Eugene Garfield

Eugene Garfield (September 16, 1925 – February 26, 2017) was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics.Garfield, Eugene, Blaise Cronin, and Helen Barsky Atkins.The Web of Knowledge: A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield. Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 2000. Garfield's work led to the development of several Information Retrieval algorithms, like HITS and Pagerank.

Garfield was born in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. Garfield died on February 26, 2017 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from a heart attack, aged 91.

 Biography 
Garfield was born in 1925 in New York City as Eugene Eli Garfinkle, and was raised in a Lithuanian-Italian Jewish family.

He studied at the University of Colorado and University of California, Berkeley before getting a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1949. Garfield also received a degree in Library Science from Columbia University in 1953.

Working as a laboratory assistant at Columbia University after his graduation, Garfield indexed all previously synthesized compounds so that not to remake them, which helped him understand that his inclination to information towards science was bigger than towards chemistry.

In 1951, he got a position at the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where most of the National Library of Medicine information systems were developed.

In 1956, Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISI formed a major part of the science division of Thomson Reuters.

 Personal life 
Garfield is survived by a wife, three sons, a daughter, a step-daughter, two granddaughters, and two great-grandchildren.

References

Other websites
 Eugene Garfield's home page 

 Eugene Garfield tells his life story (video)


Category:1925 births
Category:2017 deaths
Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction
Category:Educators from New York City
Category:American inventors
Category:Businesspeople from New York City
Category:Writers from New York City
Category:Scientists from New York City