eugene garfield, from isi to thomson reuters: a timeline · 2011. 5. 1. · about a project to find...

Escola de EngenhariaUniversidade do Minho Departamento de Sistemas de Informação »«MERCADOS E NEGÓCIOS: DINÂMICAS E ESTRATÉGIAS

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WP 104 (2010) Working papers “Mercados e Negócios” Agosto 2010

Eugene Garfield, from ISI to Thomson Reuters: a timeline

Eduardo Beira


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Eugene Garfield, from ISI to Thomson Reuters: a timeline

Eduardo Beira School of Engineering, University of Porto EDAM Professor, MIT Portugal Program

(C) Eduardo Beira, 2010. All rights. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.


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1. Eugene Garfield Eugene Garfield (1925 -...) is an unusual case of someone that combines both an entrepreneur and a scientist, and a scientist with a rare skill for multidisciplinary approaches. Garfield used the emerging information technologies, digital computers and punched cards, in order to launch several new and innovative products in the field of information services for the scholar community, especially Current Contents, and later the Science Citation Index (SCI). No comprehensive study of the business history of ISI Institute for Scientific Information, created by Garfield, is available. In this report we outline a short timeline of Eugene Garfield and ISI, as retrieved from different sources in the literature, including Garfield interviews for the Oral History Program of the Chemical Heritage Foundation (Struchio and Tackray, 1987; Williams, 1997), as well as Paul Wouters thesis (1999a) and other publications (Wouters, 1998, 1999, 2003; Wouters and Duval, 2006). Collections of papers authored by Garfield are available in his web page: http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu . Relevant information is also available in http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/pub.html). 2. From ISI to Thomson Reuters ISI headquarters were based in Philadelphia. Eugene Garfield founded and run the company between 1960 and 1992. In 1992 ISI was acquired by Thomson group, for a substantial amount of money (210 million USD). ISI was no longer controlled by Garfield, who controlled only a minority stake of 45% of the capital (although with some special rights) when the deal was done, but by another company, JPT Publishing, to whom Garfield had previously sold a controlling stake in ISI. Garfield has told about the vagaries and vicissitudes of the transaction with JPT in an interview (Williams 1997). Garfield reasons to sell the control of ISI to JPT were well described, and once again they seem typical of this kind of situations: problems with (lack of) continuity in the family, leader age and some health problems, and (perhaps most especially) continuing financial needs to support the growth of the company. ISI had about 300,000 customers and a positive operating profit (estimated around 14 million USD) with a turnover of around150 million, according to information from the press . It was the undisputed leader of information services to the scientific community, the area where it was the well-recognized precursor. Garfield has been President / CEO


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until 1992, and then became Chairman, and later Chairman Emeritus. (Williams 1997) The fate of the ISI is typical of an innovative start-up success: sold to a large group where it is integrated within a portfolio of related business. Probably JPT had bought ISI for the purpose of resale with short-term profit. Garfield himself admits that JPT has bought ISI with the well-defined objective of selling the company to the Thomson group, and he even shows appreciation for the business acumen of JPT leaders. Garfield also benefited financially from this second operation (he still held 45% interest and a contract for the company's president). And so an innovative start-up that had definitely had changed the scholar research is made and managed, and small company (fewer than 500 people), entered into a large international group. Thomson Group is now called Thomson Reuters, after the merger with Reuters Group in 2008. Thomson Reuters defines himself as "The leading source of intelligent information for the word's business and professionals, Providing customers with competitive advantage, ... must-have insight to the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare, science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization" (Thomson Reuters, 2010). With more than 55,000 employees in more than 100 countries and a turnover of around USD 13 billion (in 2009), Thomson Reuters is a leading global information services. The original business of ISI is now part of a subsidiary (ISI World of Technology) whose name has been subject to successive amendments. This subsidiary is part of the business unit "Healthcare and Science”, inside the Professional Division of Thomson Reuters. The Science part of the “Healthcare and Science” business unit is in turn divided into two business units: the Life Sciences unit and Scholarly Research, which markets solutions that support the work of researchers and scholars, like the ISI Web of Technology (WoT) platform, and the ScholarOne services and the EndNote. products WoK World of Knowledge includes Web of Science (WoS), a badge which incorporates, among other things, the databases with citations from scientific journals and newspapers, and their indexing and abstracts - whose methodological bases and databases are directly derived from original business of ISI. Gilayrevskii and Chernyi (2009) identify the key WoS databases that were created by ISI. See also (Chernyi 2009), about the structure and contents of WoS and WoK. 3. Eugene Garfield and ISI: a timeline


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1925 Eugene Garfield is born (New York City) (4) 1948 B.S., chemistry, Columbia University (4) 1950 Research Chemist, Evans Research and Development Corporation (4) 1951 Garfield joins Welch Machine Indexing Project, at Johns Hopkins University. The project was established to find solutions to the Army Medical Library retrieval problems and to evaluate machine methods for indexing (3, 4). 1952 Start of Contents in Advance, precursor of Current Contents idea (3). 1953 Garfield organizes the “First Symposium on Machine Methods in Scientific Documentation”, within Welch Project activities (3) W. Adair (former vice president of Shepard's Content owner company, then retired) reads about a project to find out if machines could be used to improve efficiency of indexing and retrieving medical literature (Welch Medical Library) and offers his expertise. A junior member of the project staff (Eugene Garfield, then 25 years old) answers his letter, but no follow up. Later, Garfield resumed contact with Adair, after being fired by Welch Medical Project in 1953 (1,4). His refusal to stop publishing Contents in Advance was the main official reason (4). 1954 M.S. Degree, library science, Columbia University (4) Stops publishing Contents in Advance (transferred to Ann McCann) (4) DocuMation Inc is incorporated. Eugene Garfield is President (4) 1955 DocuMation Inc., publishes Management's Documentation Preview (1,3).


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Experimental citation index for patents (2,4) Garfield paper on Science (“Citation indexes for science: a new dimension in documentation through association of ideas”, Science, 122 (1955) 108-111) 1956 DocuMation changes name to Eugene Garfield Associates, to avoid confusion with the name of another company in the field (5) Management's Documentation Preview changes name and becomes Current Contents Management (1) Citation index to Old Testament, by Garfield, presented at American Documentation Institute, Philadelphia (2). Bell Labs contract to supply Current Contents Management (500 copies per issue) (4,5). Bell Labs offers to buy DocuMation to help finance the company (4). Garfield survives because he had professional consulting work (Smith Klein, …) (4) 1957 First serious support from a scientist (G. Allen) (2) First proposal for NSF (refused) (2) 1958 Life Sciences edition of Current Contents becomes an official subscription service (3) First professional contact of Garfield with J. D. Bernal (3). 1959 Files for patent: “Copying and reproducing device” (issued 1962, US Patent 3064078) Letter from J. Ledergerg, Nobel prize (medicine), a turning point in the history of SCI Science Citation Index (2). Lederberg letters with Garfield are reproduced in Laderberg (2000). 1960 DocuMation Inc changes name to ISI Institute for Scientific Information, under inspiration from Russian VINITI (3). Garfield becomes President and CEO (4). NIH / NSF grant to build and test a citation index for published genetics literature that employed IBM punched cards systems: Genetics Citation Index. NSF changes policy for grants: for profit organizations can be eligible.


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Index Chemicus launched (integrated chemical compound and reaction database fully linked with citation index) Second proposal to NSF: to construct a citation index by scanning a list of one thousand journals and processing all references to forty three specified genetics journals as well as twenty two specified general science journals; approved (2) 1961 Ph.D., structural linguistics, University of Pennsylvania (4) 1963 First edition SCI covering year 1961 literature. Annual edition (1) Landmark PSAC Panel on Science Information report (3) Garfield teaches at Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Penn University (3). Files for patent: “Document copying device having parallel signal transmission parts” (issue 1967, US Patent 3318996) 1964 Quarterly SCI with an annual cumulating (1) 1965 ISI sells 20% of the company for half a million USD convertible debenture (4) Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) launched (1) “Four horsemen of the Apocalypse” revolt in ISI. Four vice presidents of ISI leave and started a new company (Information Corporation of America) (4) 1966 Files for patent “Character recognition selective copying and reproducing apparatus” (issued 1970, US Patent 3512129) 1967 Robert Maxwell (Pergamon Press, …) sues ISI and tries to buy the company (4) 1970 SCI 5 year cumulating, 1965 to 1969 (1)


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1975 Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) (1) 1975 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), impact factors of journals are born (1) 1978 Science journal reports that Garfield is now head of an “information empire” founded on the lowly footnote, and says ISI to be the first multimillion dollar corporation “to be based on providing access to scientific literature”. It also notes that SCI “culls footnotes from more than 2600 scientific journals, allowing researchers to identify topic relationships missed by subject indexes” (7) 1979 Garfield book “Citation indexing: its theory and application in science, technology and humanities” published (J. Wiley & Sons, 1979). 1980 All index available in CDROM (1) 1986 Garfield starts a new journal, The Scientist, and becomes Publisher and Editor in Chief (4,5). The journal targeted scientist of science (5) 1989 Thomson Corporation created by merging of two companies (Thomson Newspapers and International Organization) 1990 JPT Publishing friendly acquires a control stake in ISI. Garfield remains with 45% equity (4) 1992 JPT Publishing sells controlling stake in ISI to Thomson Group, based on Canada. Garfield also sells his stake (4).


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Garfield becomes Chairman (4). 1993 Garfield becomes Chairman Emeritus (4). 1995 Scientific American incident (4) 1997 ISI launches web based integration of SCI, SSCI and A&HCI (future basis of World of Science) (1) 2005 Thomson Scientific (ex ISI) launches Web of Science, integrating five ISI databases 2007 Thomson Corporation merges with Reuter. Thomson-Reuters becomes a global leader in scientific, medical, juridical and financial information (5,6) Notas:

(1) Trollet e O'Neill (1998) (2) Wouters (1999) (3) Garfield, E. (2007b) (4) Williams (1997) (5) Gilayrevskii e Cherny (2009) (6) Cherny (2009) (7) Broad (1978)

For a list of honours of Eugene Garfield, see (4)


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4. SCI Science Citation Index : origins and battlefields Some comments about SCI origins and the battlefields that Garfield and ISI needed to fight in order to market it (partially based on Wouters,1999a,b): - The roots of SCI are outside the world of science and it reuse earlier ideas from other fields: the principle of a citation index is not a creation from the world of science, but reuses a common practice among American lawyers since the second half of the nineteenth century (1873): the Shepard Citator. Almost one hundred years later, his hierarchical indexing model served as a model for the ISI SCI. During 1954, in his initial phase, Garfield wrote a text entitled "Shepardazing the literature of science". He begins by reviewing the Shepard's Citator, then describes the efforts to develop a numerical code for the various publications, specifies a "citation index to science "and the requirements of equipment to help the process. Here he finds inspiration in an electronic equipment that aids reading for the blind and amblyopic, developed in 1947 by RCA (Radio Corporation of America). Struchio and Tackray (1987) report that Garfield discovered the Shepard Index, after a letter from William Adair suggesting the potential of the same indexing methodology when applied to index the academic literature. Garfield, who ignored the Shepard Index, tells that he rushed to the nearest library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and was thrilled with what he found - not exactly with Shepard Index itself, but with the method behind the product: “When I saw the Shepard I found the methodology that I needed for linking all these things, for indexing all these cited references that were sited in the (scientific) review (articles)”, as cited by Thackray and Brock (2000). Among the ideas that influenced Garfield, those of the English scientist J. Bernal had special importance. Bernal was one of the first scholars to speak of a "quantitative science of the science", defending the planning of scientific activity towards solving social problems, and a radical change in the pattern of publication of scientific articles (Bernal, 1939, p. 269-297). Bernal was part of the group of British "red intellectuals" during the years 30 to 50, who were strongly influenced and seduced by the "successes" of the USSR experience. His book "The social function of science" (Bernal, 1939) had great impact at the time. A second edition was published by The MIT Press in 1967, with a new foreword by Bernal himself, where he evaluates very positively the impact of ideas in the book, twenty five years since its publication - but in reality Bernal would hardly recognize the current organization of science. In his writings Garfield makes repeated references to Bernal. For instance, see Garfield (2007), a recent contribution to a seminar commemorating the work of Bernal work, where Garfield analyzes the influence of


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Bernal through an analysis of his (Bernal) citations. In this essay Garfield also comments about his personal friendship and professional contacts with Bernal. - The SCI was born outside the scientific community, and promoted and developed by an outsider of the system, without any affiliation with any respected academic institution, and in its early days clearly has not been "well received" by the scientific community - his first applications to support prototyping and construction of an index of citations were rejected by an evaluation committee of the NSF National Science Foundation. Later he benefited from the requirements of the "new" culture of bureaucratic rationalization associated with the organizational apparatus needed to manage the public investment in R&D, in the post war USA, specially after the 60s. - The SCI success was neither quick neither easy - it only survived because funded by profits generated by other ISI products, in particular the different Current Contents. The subsequent success of scientometrics had been a completely unforeseen by SCI creators. Between decades 60 and 90, SCI indexing of scholar literature has evolved from a simple system of information retrieval (find relevant published information), and selective dissemination of information, into a tool to assess research results. Garfield (1998) even found himself obliged to point out that the SCI was never originally designed for quantitative studies on science: “The new generation of scientists and even scientometricians need to be regularly reminded that the Science Citation Index (SCI) was not originally created either to conduct quantitative studies, calculate impact factors, nor to facilitate the study of history of science”. (GARFIELD, 1998). 5. An innovative technical entrepreneur and salesman If we define technology as a combination of artifacts (computers and software), people (users) and ideas (how to use articles of new services or products) (see Hargadon, 2003, 2006), the path of Garfield and the ISI is a good case of business innovation as a new recombination of people, artifacts and ideas, in order to create additional value - the paradigm of technological innovation. Garfield was a typical "broker" of innovation, gathering ideas from different areas, and able to build connections between concepts from different "worlds", and finding and exploiting new technological combinations capable of sustaining the growth of a business.


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Wouters (1999a, p.77-78) wrote about Garfield: " Without the drive, perseverance, social capacities, and technical expertise of Eugene Garfield, the immense task of building SCI probably would not even have been thinkable. It's not only a matter of personal traits, but also of being in the right place at right time. Garfield was an outsider on more than one respect, which made it possible for him to think about solutions other people would reject immediately. Garfield was well prepared for information services, Current Contents being the proof of that”. Social mechanisms of innovation involve two crucial steps for which Garfield was particularly well gifted and capable: in addition to gradually find such new recombination, Garfield was a fighter able to build and to consolidate a growing community of users sticking to their ideas of how to use his services (products), including an academic network increasingly interested in their ideas about citation analysis and its applications in research and also to assess of academic research - the social mechanisms of “bridging and building" that today are well recognized as fundamental mechanisms of innovation. Innovation processes usually fail because (a) it fails the ability to find viable recombination between ideas of different "worlds" or (b) because it fails the subsequent ability to create a growing network of users on the ideas of using this new recombination. Garfield was very good in both. During thirty years, from 60s to 90s, Garfield has been the explorer of new business opportunities and new ideas (research bibliometric and citation analysis) opened by new information technologies (in the 60s he begun with IBM punched cards and a 16K IBM1401). Wouters (2000) classifies Garfield as the "alchemist" who found a unique combination of "concept, computer and literature", a beautiful example of applying an old concept (citation index) in a new context (science) with new technologies (digital computers). But during the process, as seen, the concept itself had a radical transformation. Garfield's diverse experience in different fields of science, as well as his personal qualities, made an important contribution. He defined himself as a salesman: "I always think that I have been a consummate salesman. I was always very eager to talk to people about our products, and pursue leads. I was the supersalesman. That was something I did not leave entirely. I still have the temptation to get on the phone and sell somebody our products. And I always tended to engage in almost constant dialogue with the customers" (Thackray, Sturchio, 1987).


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eugene garfield, from isi to thomson reuters: a timeline · 2011. 5. 1. · about a project to find...

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