Abstract
Eugene Garfield’s ideas on citation indexing were gradually shaped over the course of the 1950s by his exposure to the thinking of various individuals such as J. D. Bernal, H. G. Wells, Chauncey Leake, William Adair, and Joshua Lederberg. Two key concepts emerged during this early period which guided his later work: the importance of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research and the notion that references could be used to index the documents they cited. These ideas were the basis for his landmark product the Science Citation Index. However, it took many years for the significance of his early insights to be appreciated and manifested in research studies and products. And in a real sense, we continue to work out the implications of these ideas even today.
Introduction
Gene Garfield’s views on the nature of science ultimately led him to create a unified citation index for all of science rather than separate indexes covering individual disciplines. Disciplinary indexing services such as Chemical Abstracts and Biological Abstracts were the rule in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not initially clear that a unified approach would be commercially viable compared to separate disciplinary indexes, but he took the gamble. However, whether the unified index captured interdisciplinary activity was not evident until much later when various analytical methods provided a global view of the data.
His views on citation indexing evolved gradually from the point in 1953 when he first learned about how citation indexing had been applied in the field of law to the actual compilation of the first Science Citation Index (SCI) for 1961, particularly regarding the amount and type of information that should be captured. In his early work, he had speculated on what could be done if the sentences at the point of citation could be captured and analyzed. However, the practical limitations of production forced him to modify this ambitious plan. Reviewing these original plans helps us envision how we need to think about citation indexing today.
My goal in this paper is to show how Gene’s conception of a multidisciplinary citation index can be combined with his early ideas on citation indexing, and how combining these ideas opens up new research possibilities.
Hybrid Disciplines and the Structure of Science
Prior to his going off to college, Gene was given a copy of J. D. Bernal’s book the Social Function of Science by one of his Marxist-leaning uncles (Bernal, ; Garfield, , p. 41). Gene took the book to college in Colorado in 1942 at age 17 and discussed it with his fellow students. Bernal’s views on science were, of course, highly influenced by Marxist ideology, which was popular in New York City in the 1930s where Gene grew up. For example, Bernal wrote in 1938: “The corner-stone of the Marxist state is the utilization of human knowledge, science and technique, directly for human welfare” (Bernal, , p. 222). In later life, Gene seems to have shared at least one aspect of that ideology, namely that science should serve human welfare (Garfield, , p. 82), although there is no evidence that Gene, as a businessman and owner of Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), shared Bernal’s political views that science was better suited to the communist than the capitalist system. Bernal thought the communist system could better plan and coordinate the work of scientists.
For such planning purposes, Bernal proposed a “… general framework or skeleton of organization which would remain substantially unchanged for a time longer than it is convenient to plan for” (Bernal, , p. 279). He then presented what might be regarded as an early map of science.
Figure 1 shows only the physical science portion of this map. The biology portion is on a separate page, with arrows going from one page to the other indicating the flow of knowledge. What Bernal calls “sophisticated” (basic) science is at the top and “practical” (or applied) science at the bottom with arrows connecting top and bottom as well. Bernal went on: “Such a chart must not be taken as an adequately considered scheme, which whole committees of experts would be needed to prepare …” (Bernal, , p. 280). We do not know whether Gene was influenced by Bernal’s maps to undertake later forays into science mapping and the development of the “historiograph,” but given that he had studied Bernal’s book at an early age, a formative influence is quite possible.
Figure 1
In his college and early working career, Gene was exposed to many different scientific disciplines and disciplinary combinations: chemistry, medicine, physics, engineering, and hybrid fields such as physical chemistry when he worked for Louis P. Hammett at Columbia University after receiving his undergraduate degree in chemistry. At different points in his college career, he wanted to be a biochemist or go to medical school (Garfield,
In 1952 at age 27, he took his first purely information job at the Welch Medical Library in Baltimore to index chemical nomenclature in medical articles (Garfield,
On that project, Gene was exposed to many new ideas in documentation. For example, he became, in his own words, a “punch card guru” and an expert in programming the newly arrived IBM 101 statistical machine (Garfield,
On the Welch project, he also began thinking about access to the totality of human knowledge. In another unpublished paper, Gene wrote: “The Renaissance man could attempt to master all of human knowledge in a lifetime, but certainly 20th century man cannot even conceive of doing this in one hundred lifetimes. But if he cannot know everything, we can be satisfied with the ability to recall any small portion of the totality of knowledge at any given moment. Surely Faustus would have liked to have at his fingertips the record of all previous human achievements, if he could simply reach down and consult his universal pocket encyclopedia … We documentalists envision an eighth wonder of the world: a mechanical brain that will recall any or all of the world’s wisdom at will” (Garfield,
In the introduction to the first SCI in 1963, Gene wrote the following somewhat cryptic line, recalling his work at the Welch library: “I had been working out a method of utilizing the sentences and citations appearing in review articles as entries in large-scale interdisciplinary science indexes” (Garfield,
The story of how he got the idea to create a citation index for science has been recounted many times (Wouters, 1999, p. 23). On the Welch project, he organized a conference on machine methods in documentation in which 300 people attended, including some of the leading figures in documentation of the day. The keynote speaker at the conference was a vice president of Johns Hopkins who was quoted as saying “Man was going to drown in a flood of papers” (Thackray and Brock,
Later on, after he was fired from the Welch project and decided to attend library school at Columbia University, Gene wrote a term paper on citation indexing (Garfield,
In the 1955 paper, he also alluded to his work at the Welch project: “By using authors’ references for the Citation Index we are in effect utilizing an actual army of indexers, in that every time an author makes a reference he is essentially indexing that work from his own point of view. It can be shown that this is especially true in the review article where each statement, followed by a reference, is very much like an index entry ….” This was followed by a citation to his unpublished paper from 1952 (Garfield,
The Science paper also argued that citation indexing would capture interdisciplinarity: “The farther away you get from the immediate subject area of the main article, the fewer the references to it you will locate. Yet these may well be the most useful references of all, for the cross fertilization of subject fields is one of the most important problems in scientific literature” (Garfield,
Four years later in 1959, when he had completed his library degree and began his consulting business in Philadelphia, he presented a paper on the idea of a “unified index to science” at the International Conference on Scientific Information held in Washington, DC, USA. This was an important conference for Gene where he met researchers from all over the world, including J. D. Bernal. Gene’s paper at the conference dealt with the idea of combining all existing disciplinary indexing services, and he noted some of the hybrid disciplines that might benefit from a unified approach and which he considered key to the advancement of science: “A Unified index to Science would be a convenience even if the strictly academic intra-disciplinary approaches were still the primary targets of today’s research. In this era, however, of the bio-physicist, the psycho-chemist, the human engineer, the instrumentation scientist, and the cosmo-biologist, a unified Index to Science is an absolutely necessary working tool for unfettered scientific progress” (Garfield,
Early Ideas for a Citation Index for Science
Joshua Lederberg, who had received a Nobel Prize in 1958, read Gene’s 1955 article in Science and was intrigued. He scribbled a note to Gene in 1959 asking what had happened to the idea. Lederberg wrote: “In the nature of my work, I have to spend a fair amount of effort in reading the literature of collateral fields and it is infuriating how often I have been stumped in trying to update a topic, where your scheme would have been just the solution” (Lederberg,
The exchange of letters between Lederberg and Garfield in 1959 shows the evolution of Gene’s concept of citation indexing starting with ideas developed in the Welch project regarding the citing sentence level of citation indexing. In a letter dated July 14, 1959, we get a glimpse of this early thinking. Lederberg had sent Gene a packet of his papers where Lederberg had marked within the texts where review articles had been cited. Gene wrote to Lederberg: “There is also a distressing reminder in your papers how difficult it can be to trace the statement made in connection with a particular citation. For example, you cite Cummins in your paper but without the use of numbers to identify your citation it is quite a chore to locate the sentence involved” (Lederberg,
In a follow-on letter from September 9, 1959, Gene elaborated on his concern to provide as much information as possible on the location and content of the citing passage. He had been discussing this concept with people from various government agencies. He told Lederberg: “We also discussed the question of specifying the ‘kind’ of citation involved. I believe that citation index research will pay off handsomely in the future in that this research will characterize all the different ways in which people ‘cite’ the earlier literature” (Lederberg,
We can speculate on what might have happened to the citation index concept if Gene had adopted some of his more complicated ideas on indexing described in his letters to Lederberg, such as coding reference locations in the text of papers or their rhetorical function. Adopting such refinements would have dramatically increased the time and cost of production and probably brought the whole project to a grinding halt. In the inaugural edition of the citation index for 1961 and all subsequent editions, there was no indicator for the location of the citation within the citing text, citing items only being identified by their starting page number. This simplification allowed the scaling up of production via clerical data entry and avoided the need to hire professional indexers.
In later years, of course, a major research topic has emerged dealing with the nature of citations and the reasons for citing, generally referred to as citation context analysis (Moravcsik and Murugesan,
Two further pieces of evidence point to Gene’s interest in making citing passages available for further analysis. Around the time he began working on the Welsh project, Gene had the idea of creating a device that he called the “copywriter,” a handheld device for capturing an image of a string of text by moving a stylus across a line of printed text (Garfield,
Many years later in 1997, Gene and I wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology protesting the adoption of the APA author-year format for references rather than the numbered format used up to that time and prevalent in natural science journals. We stated: “… the numbered reference list is important to citation analysis and retrieval since it facilitates location of the sentence or paragraph in which the citing statement occurs. Almost daily we track the contextual environment of citations using their numbered locations in text” (Garfield and Small,
Creating the Interdisciplinary Citation Index
In the Garfield–Lederberg correspondence from 1959, Gene also floated the idea of creating separate citation indexes for disciplinary journal subsets or individual journals, worrying that a multidisciplinary index would be more difficult to market. Lederberg objected to this idea as well: “I feel that a good general citation index will be of greater value to genetics than a too specialized run that sticks too closely to the discipline” (Lederberg,
Gene did end up creating at least one disciplinary index, the Genetics Citation Index, constructing it, however, as a subset of the multidisciplinary citation index for 1961. Lederberg had urged Gene to include, in the genetics index, literature from other disciplines that were pertinent to genetics and the only way to do this was by starting with the broader multidisciplinary index. In Lederberg’s introduction to the Genetics Citation Index, he states: “For many reasons genetics is an especially apt field for the introduction of citation indexing. It is inherently interdisciplinary, cutting across biochemistry, statistics, agriculture, and medicine, so that geneticists need insight into a wide range of scientific literature” (Lederberg,
In Gene’s introduction to the 1961 citation index, he states his rationale for not creating separate disciplinary indices, returning to his original views regarding the need for a unified, multidisciplinary index: “The increasing interdisciplinary trend of science indicates that categorical citation indexes would indeed only be a temporary or partial solution to the problem” (Garfield,
As it turned out, however, it did not prove easy to commercialize the unified index concept (Garfield,
The SCI and the Study of Interdisciplinarity
While Gene’s early conviction on how citation indexing would foster the hybridization and cross-fertilization of scientific fields was critical to the design and implementation of the SCI, there had been no systematic demonstration of this capability. The “historiograph” study had dealt with citation links within a single field, the genetic code (Garfield et al.,
Around 1970, however, an important step toward exploring this phenomenon was taken in the development of the journal citation index or what came to be called the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) (Garfield,
In 1974, I was involved in devising another method of aggregation of citation data, not based on journals but on a clustering of highly cited papers using co-citation. This led to the creation of a spatial mapping of papers, specialties, and disciplines, that is, a mapping of science (Marschakova,
When I began my research at ISI in 1972, it was not clear if I would be able to show interdisciplinary structure. Thumbing through the pages of the SCI, I ran across a highly cited paper in particle physics that I had heard about. I wondered if there were other papers on the topic. I quickly found a couple and to my surprise when I compared the lists of citing papers, they were many in common. I had attempted a similar approach in my project at the Niels Bohr Library using a sampling of references for each paper with, however, limited success (Small,
The basic idea behind co-citation mapping was to sample highly cited papers across the full index under the assumption that they could be used as intellectual markers, much in the vein of Kuhn’s exemplars. The highly cited papers, defined by some threshold, provided a convenient sampling frame. I began collaborating with Belver Griffith at Drexel University and on weekends, he would go sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. On one such weekend, on a call over a ship-to-shore radio, we discussed how, if we could define a co-citation relationship between specialty clusters, we might be able to aggregate them into something like disciplines, and then study the linkages between them. Much to our surprise, this worked and resulted in our first interdisciplinary map in 1974 (Griffith et al.,
Figure 2

Map of 1973 biomedical clusters. Boxes represent clusters. Parenthetical numbers in boxes indicate the number of cluster documents. Co-citation links between clusters are shown by connecting lines; strength of links is shown by numbers in lines. Reprinted from Garfield (
Combining Interdisciplinary Mapping with Citation Contexts
Finding interdisciplinary links was an exciting development but it raised further questions, such as what did the links mean? Because each reference could be attached to a passage in the paper that had cited it, the nature of the interdisciplinary co-citations could, in principle, be studied at the level of text. At the time, I was not familiar with Gene’s earlier ideas on using citing sentences as inspired by Chauncey Leake. In addition, in the 1970s, access to full text of articles was essentially non-existent, so the data had to be compiled by hand.
Later on, I was able to investigate the nature of some of these interdisciplinary links using co-citation contexts, that is, passages in which an author cites documents in two clusters that span disciplines. I found that some of these links were based on scientists’ thinking by analogy about problems in different fields (Small,
Conclusion
Of course, much work remains to be done to explore the various types of interdisciplinary relationships. Only now do we find ourselves with access to a sufficient corpus of full text to undertake the necessary experiments.
I see this effort now as an amalgamation of two of Gene’s primordial ideas: the idea of a unified, multidisciplinary citation index, and the importance of citing passages in understanding the nature of citation links. The ultimate goal of such research is making the concepts and methods in various disciplines accessible to other disciplines, which would be the realization of Gene’s cross-fertilization of fields.
Some of the remaining tasks have to do with the linguistic analysis of the textual passages associated with these links. Various methods are available to delineate specialties and disciplines using citation-based metrics such as co-citation or direct citation (Klavans and Boyack,
It is my hope that Gene’s early vision of what citation indexing can tell us about the nature of interdisciplinary research will soon come to fruition.
Statements
Author contributions
The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and approved it for publication.
Conflict of interest
HS was employed by the company SciTech Strategies, Inc.
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Summary
Keywords
citation indexing, +interdisciplinary research, citation contexts, mapping science, Eugene Garfield history
Citation
Small H (2018) Citation Indexing Revisited: Garfield’s Early Vision and Its Implications for the Future. Front. Res. Metr. Anal. 3:8. doi: 10.3389/frma.2018.00008
Received
13 December 2017
Accepted
12 February 2018
Published
02 March 2018
Volume
3 - 2018
Edited by
David A. Pendlebury, Clarivate Analytics, United States
Reviewed by
Ying Ding, Indiana University Bloomington, United States; Juan Ignacio Gorraiz, University of Vienna, Austria
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Copyright
© 2018 Small.
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*Correspondence: Henry Small, hsmall@mapofscience.com
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