ROCKLAND COUNTY REGIONAL ACS MEETING, APRIL 11, 1973

Introductory remarks to present the various abstracts.


A prepared speaker is, of course, someone with a prepared speech, and being such, he has some advantage over his audience. He knows what he is going to say, while the audience does not. This may seem obvious, indeed it may seem to be the whole point of presenting a prepared speech, and beyond any question that a sensible man would ask. I hope I am more than merely a sensible man, and so I am going to question it, because it needs to be questioned. For, all things considered, the situation of the prepared speech just doesn’t have all that going for it. Consider the all too frequent deadly results.

This evening, therefore, I propose that we depart from the usual practice, and even things out a bit between us. If you don’t yet know what I intend to say, then I propose that I shan’t know either, and we’ll go about it this way. I have here five or six abstracts of different speeches and papers, some of them recent, some not so recent. I am going to read the abstracts to you, and then you are going to tell me which of them you'd like me to develop further and discuss with you.

JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL DOCUMENTATION 7:147-153, August 1967.

ISI’s Experiences with ASCA--A Selective Dissemination System

Eugene Garfield and Irving H. Sher
Institute for Scientific Information
Philadelphia, Penna. 19106
 

ASCA (Automatic Subject Citation Alert) is a commercially available SDI system covering the journal literature. The repertoire of questions which ASCA can utilize indludes cited references, words from titles, authors, organizations, etc., and allows for logical combinations of these questions. This paper discusses differences and similarities between "citations" and "words" in retrieving and disseminating information. The problem of use
system interaction is explored, and some techniques for developing effective interest profiles are described. Although ASCA is a multi-disciplinary system, examples from fields like synthetic chemistry and biochemistry are provided.


CHEMISTRY 4l(7): 24-3l, July/August 1968

The Information Implosion

Eugene Garfield
Institute for Scientific Information
Philadelphia, Penna.
 

Today, with the volume of scientific information doubling every 10 to 15 years, a whole new field of information science and technology has sprung up to enable scientists to use the vast amount of scientific information being released by the expanding energy of research. The aim of the new science and technology of information is to turn the so-called "information explosion" into an information "implosion." Two facts are at the basis of our work at ISI to achieve this goal: (1) despite the huge number of scientific journals published today, most of the important information can be found in a relatively small number of core journals; and (2) all science has become so interrelated that attempts to restrict an information service to one branch of science would result in the loss of much valuable information.

NATURE 227:669-671, August 15, 1973

Citation Indexing for Studying Science

Eugene Garfield, Ph. D.
Institute for Scientific Information
Philadelphia, Penna. 19106
 

When the Science Citation Index was first proposed, its major objective was to break the so-called subject index barrier. Out of this bibliographic experiment has evolved a historiographic and sociometric tool of major importance. Like most other scientific discoveries, this tool can be used wisely or abused. It is now up to the scientific community t o prevent abuse of the SCI by devoting the necessary attention to its proper and judicious exploitation.

NATURE 242(5396): 307-309, March 30, 1973

The Synthetic chemical Literature from 1960 to 1969

Eugene Garfield, Gabrielle S. Revesz Joanne H. Batzig
Institute for Scientific Information,
Philadelphia, Penna. 19106
 

The literature of synthetic chemistry is growing at a rate of 8.7% a year--that is, doubling every 8.3 years. Data on 1.2 million compounds based on more than 128,000 abstracts published in Index Chemicus have been analyzed. The articles abstracted contain 9.2 new compounds on average.

SCIENCE l78(4060): 47l-479, 1972

Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation

Eugene Garfield
Institute for Scientific Information
Philadelphia, Penna.
 

The Science Citation Index is a tool designed for information retrieval through cited references. By discovering what papers have cited a previously published paper, one can retrieve articles related to it on one or more aspects of the subject of interest. Citation indexing, thus, traces the relationship between single papers. The same data, however, can be used to trace the relationship between journals. Once the relationship has been established in discovering what journals have cited and been cited by other journals, one has an objective criterion for evaluating the use of individual journals and groups of journals in the transfer of scientific information. One has also an extremely effective instrument for management of library periodical collections and for evaluation of research results in the light of science policy.

Historiographs, Librarianship, and the History of Science
 

        Eugene Garfield
        Institute for Scientific Information
          Philadelphia, Penna.
 
IN: Toward a Theory of Librarianship: Papers in Honor of Jesse Hauk Shera, ed. by Conrad H. Rawski (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973), pp. 380-402.
 
A new tool that promises to help the historian of science is the historiograph, a term coined by the Institute of Scientific Information to describe a graphic display of citation data that shows key scientific events, their chronology, their inter-relationships, and their relative importance. Although the technical feasibility of this tool has been established, and a good portion of the required citation database is available, much work remains to acquaint the historian of science with its availability and its applications.