| FROM: Dr. Eugene Garfield
August 3, 1959 Dr. J. Lederberg
Dear Dr. L: I want to get off a quick answer to your letter (note) in which you state that Dean Alway was pleased to have our offer of a free trial. We will be glad to set up arrangements as of September 1. This happens to be the day we publish (i.e. our publication date is every Tuesday) so we will begin with that issue. As you indicate we will send the promotional stuff along with the issues of CC. We will send 30 copies of each weekly issue to the Dean at the address you gave: Dean Robert Alway, Stanford U. Med. Sch. Palo Alto -- Stanford Med. Ctr., Palo Alto, Calif. Ordinarily bulk shipments do not come pre-addressed. In cases like Columbia each faculty member gets his own copy and they pay a flat $32.50 on account of the quantity involved. In bulk the 30 copy rate is $ 30 each. So if you want each addressed and/or mailed by us it will be $32.50 per man per year. If you want us to address and then ship in bulk it would sort of foul up our procedures as we have a different way of handling the bulk orders. The printer mails them, so it would be hard for us to get the addresses over to him. If it is too difficult for the Dean's office to distribute then I suggest that we do the addressing and mail them second class and charge the $ 32.50 rate. We would prefer if possible to have one bill, but again that may not be possible. I have not been idle about CI. In fact I have made much progress and there is a rather detailed letter on my desk which I had started to write you this weekend, but I had to finish up some other work first. I met Gordon Allen in person and also Geo. LeFevre. He mentioned that you called. I spoke to him, a Dr. Shapard, and MissTolkan. Yes they are all in favor of the idea but brother do they make it tough. However, I have literally been spending half of the last week gathering together a lot of information which I hope will satisfy them. I am glad to report that there is no particular filing date for applications. However, it will take at least three months to get any kind of action. I am also, tomorrow (hence my rush) going to see the Air Force people (Dr. H. Wooster). I agree that genetics is not the best field to work in, but I have to start somewhere. I would, frankly, prefer to compile a citation index to a group of journals like Nature so that we got an across-the-board sampling of different fields in both directions. You have a very goad point about the genetics journals. However, there would be advantages even in this small field if we draw citations from all over. For example, I am enclosing a few citations to your papers that I happened upon in doing some reference counts for my data. By the way there were 13 references to journals in genetics in six monthly issues of J. Bacteriology. Art. by Lederberg (no news to you) in J. Bact. v.75 p.143 contains ref. to his papers. Also, see p. 513, art. by Zamenhof to EM Lederberg, and p. 522, art. by Demain, ref. to your paper; also p. 575 art. by Landman; also p. 277 article by Ellis all vol. 75(1958). In Sch. Zeit. f. Allg. Path. Bakt. vol. 17 p. 740 see p. 734 "en faisant agir la penicillin sur des cellules en croissance ralentie, selon Lederberg (17) in article by A. Bolle and E. Kellenberg v.21:714-740 (1948); also see p. 765 in art. by Welsch, U. Liege refer. #27-29. Complete article p. 741-768. I got a good idea, I think, for overcoming the problem of size of a CI. Why can't each journal issue a yearly supplement, just as they do their index, which would be a citation index for that year? Since there are only an average of about 15 references per paper in toto the number of entries would be fairly small -- just a few pages for a journal like GENETICS. Of course, the first issue would be large since it would presumably cover all the back literature. You will be hearing from me again shortly with a complete report on trip to Washington and the data I have compiled. It is very promising data. My guess about 5¢ per reference wasn't far off and I'm glad to say that it is probably much less. Sincerely yours, Eugene Garfield |