The scientometric portrait of Eugene Garfield through the free ResearcherID service from the Web of Science Core Collection of 67 million master records and 1.3 billion references

Abstract

Eugene Garfield came up with the idea of citation-based searching in the early 1950s, and followed it by releasing three unique databases, for the Sciences, Social Sciences, and Arts & Humanities, as well as a yearly Journal Citations Report for the Sciences and thee Social Sciences. It took more than four decades before other database publishers started to add the cited references to their indexing/abstracting records. The Google Scholar database has been built on Garfield’s original idea, and broadly idolized as a free database. Garfield’s ultimate response -among others- was to release a database to allow the users to look up by author names or identification code. This article paints a scientometric portrait of Garfield as a tribute, demonstrating and commenting on how many times his ouvre was cited by, in which sources (processed for the Citation Indexes), when and where, from which countries and institutions, in which format.