Page "Eugene Garfield" Paragraph 1

Following ideas inspired by Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 article " As We May Think ", Garfield undertook the development of a comprehensive citation index showing the propagation of scientific thinking ; he started the Institute for Scientific Information in 1955.

The creation of the Science Citation Index made it possible to calculate impact factors, which measure the importance of scientific journals.

It led to the unexpected discovery that a few journals like Nature and Science were core for all of hard science.

The same pattern does not happen with the humanities or the social sciences.