The Evolution of the Science Citation Index Authors Eugene Garfield Abstract The Science Citation Index was proposed over 50 years ago to facilitate the dissemination and retrieval of scientific literature. Its unique search engine, based on citation searching, was not widely adopted until it was made available online in 1972. Its by product, Journal Citation Reports, became available in 1975 and included its rankings by impact factor. Impact factors were not widely implemented until about a decade ago, when they began to be used as surrogates for expected citation frequencies for recently published papersa highly controversial application of scientometrics in evaluating scientists and institutions. Here, the inventor of both the SCI and its companion, Social Sciences Citation Index, review the history of these instruments and discusses their more recent use in graphically visualizing microhistories of scholarly topics. In an example thereof, the patented HistCite software for algorithmic historiographic analysis is used to follow the genealogy of the Watson-Crick discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and its relationship to the work of Heidelberger, Avery, and others. Downloads Text complet (Català) Published 2010-01-22 Issue 5-1 Section Distinguished lectures. Ramon Margalef Award for Ecology 2012 License This work is subject, unless the contrary is indicated in the text, the photographs or in other illustrations, to an Attribution —Non-Commercial— No Derivative Works 3.0 Creative Commons License, the full text of which can be consulted at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work provided that the author is credited and reuse of the material is restricted to non-commercial purposes only and that no derivative works are created from the original material.
