Citation Analysis Pioneer Receives Lifetime Achievement Award

Dr. Eugene Garfield, who invented citation analysis in the field of library science some 50 years ago, was awarded the Online Information Lifetime Achievement Award last week in London, England.

The concepts behind citation analysis have played a major intellectual influence on link analysis, the core of Google's method of indexing websites.

Back in May 2004, the ResourceShelf website presented a series of links to interviews with Dr. Garfield, to a website containing his many scholarly and technical publications, as well as to a paper by a group at IBM that preceeded Google.

Earlier Library Boy posts on "library pioneers" include:

• The "Patron Saints" of Our Profession (August 2, 2006): "The founder of OCLC, Frederick G. Kilgour, died Monday, age 92. We don’t often celebrate the 'patron saints' of our profession, the people who laid the intellectual foundations of what we do everyday. Panizzi, Dewey, Cutter, Lubetzky, Ranganathan, Garfield, Vannevar Bush, Vincent Cerf. And Kilgour. When you stop to think of it, we would be drowning in one huge mess had it not been for our predecessors who came up with the rules for cataloguing, the field of citation analysis, the logic of hypertext or the structure for OCLC."
• Online Tribute to OCLC Founder and Library Pioneer Frederick Kilgour (October 23, 2006): "Next Tuesday, October 31, 2006, there will be a tribute to Frederick G. Kilgour, the librarian who founded OCLC in 1967. Kilgour, a pioneer of library automation and the creator of the planet's largest online catalogue Worldcat, died this summer."
• Another Library Pioneer Passes Away - Founder of Lexis (November 27, 2006): "The Law Librarian Blog posted today about the death on November 12 of H. Donald Wilson, the first president of Mead Data Central, the developer of what became LexisNexis (...) The Post article mentions that Wilson 'died of a heart attack ... in front of his computer'."