The
relationship between ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) of Philadelphia
and the All Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI)
predates my first informal encounter with a few VINITI employees during
my first visit to Moscow in 1961. That was the year of the
5th International Congress of Biochemistry held in Moscow.
In
1952, I began publishing
Contents in Advances at the Johns Hopkins
University project and continued to publish it while at library school.
In June, 1954, I left Columbia University to serve as a private documentation
consultant to Smith, Kline & French Laboratories. Then in 1955,
Eugene Garfield Associates began publishing Current Contents for
management and social sciences. In 1957, we began Current Contents
for the pharmaceutical industry. (Its full title was Current Contents
of Chemical, Pharmaco-Medical, & Life Sciences.) In
1960, Eugene Garfield Associates became the Institute for Scientific Information
of Philadelphia (ISI). Our name was in part inspired by the founding
of VINITI.
The
detailed history of ISI, a private non-governmental commercial institution,
is more than adequately described in the literature.[1],[2],[3]Few
people here will recall my blatant youthful challenge to CAS and VINITI
when we changed our name to ISI.[4]We
proposed to solve the scientific information crisis with our smaller staff
in contrast to the thousands required to produce traditional abstracting
a la Chemical Abstracts and VINITI.In
1960, the Science Citation Index (SCI) had not yet started.That
was the year we began the experimental Genetics Citation Index[5]
and also launched the Index Chemicus.[6]
Our
initial challenge to traditional abstracting services was the launch of
Current
Contents.By 1960, the Life Sciences
edition was only about three years old but was already quite popular.As
I have often stated,
Current Contents is my real claim to fame.But
for all intents and purposes it is ignored by historians of library and
information science.If you mention
ISI to librarians they usually think of SCI or the Social Sciences
Citation Index.If you mention
ISI to senior scientists they will mainly think of Current Contents.Butthat
generality is gradually changing as the differences between CC and
SCI
become blurred in the ISI Web of Knowledge.
This
brief history of ISI is significant in explaining why I and other speakers
have come here to laud the historic effort made by the founders of VINITI
and theReferatvnyi Zhurnali to meet
the challenge of Western abstracting services.In
the West we had dozens of disciplinary indexing services in the chemical,
physical, biological, engineering, and agricultural sciences.Most
of these are members of National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing
Services.When the Academy of Sciences
of the USSR decided to launch VINITI, it clearly was the appropriate multi-disciplinary
solution to the needs of Soviet science.It
had all the advantages and disadvantages of what were already traditional
approaches to the literature in the West.Not
only were VINITI Russian language abstracts useful but its multi-disciplinary
coverage was unique and made it useful even in the West due to its comprehensive
coverage of Russian and Eastern literature.Indeed,
my paper at the 1958 International Conference on Scientific Information
in Washington described the need for a unified approach to indexing the
literature.[7]
This
concept of multi-disciplinarity would later be a center piece of SCI
philosophy.
A
significant disadvantage of both Eastern and Western abstracting services
was lack of timeliness.Current
Contents provided this key ingredient in disseminating scientific information.Especially
in theera of Sputnik, six months
delay in abstracting was intolerable.Such
a delay in today�s era of the World Wide Web would be considered archaic.The
time dimension has completely changed.Now
everything is up on the web even before it is �published.�
The second novel aspect
of
CC wasaccessibility.By
providing a simple author address directory, readers could request reprints
from authors -- and they did so by the millions.Any
senior scientist knows how much this directory was utilized by colleagues
worldwide.Scientists throughout
the world remember the beautiful Soviet stamps used on reprint request
cards from the USSR.
There
was another unintended effect of Current Contents in the East.For
reasons that are not completely understood, Current Contents was
not delayed by the Soviet censors.Apparently
it was not perceived as a traditional journal.Consequently,
my weekly essays in CC were widely read by Soviet and Eastern scientists
and helps explain why my name was well known in the USSR.Of
course, I did not use my CC pulpit to criticize the political system.I
simply provided a small window on the West by discussing themes of universal
interest which seemed to be appreciated.As
I was often told by Eastern Bloc and Sovietscientists,
they did not need for me to point out the flaws of communist society any
more than American scientists needed to be remindedof
the flaws in capitalist society.
After
the official launch of the SCI in 1964, ISI increasingly became
identifiedwith science policy studies.SCI
made the field of scientometrics a practical possibility.This
was immediately evident to scholars such as Robert K. Merton and Vassily
V. Nalimov, whose 1969 book Naukometriya[8]
recognized this fact.
I have recently
posted the English translation to my website at:
http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/nalimov/nalimovmeasurementofscience/book.pdf
In subsequent years, I and
others published many scientometric studies of Soviet science.[9]I
first met V. V. Nalimov at the Moscow Book Fair in the early sixties and
then regularly until his death.ISI
Press was proud to publish four of his books in English.[10]A
further VINITI connection to ISI was the membership of Professor Mikhailov
on the Editorial Advisory Board of the SCI.Beyond
that VINITI connection were my lecture tours in the USSR.This
was due primarily to the vision of Victor Vaskovsky of the Far Eastern
Branch of the Russian Academy at Vladivostok who recognized the importance
of the SCI.He became a member
of the SCI Editorial Board.Through
him I became associated with the Marine Biology Laboratory and its present
and former directors, Professors Vladimir Kasyanov and Alexey Zhirmunsky.
There was also a significant
historic link between ISI and VINITI because of my personal acquaintance
with J. D. Bernal.It is well known
that he was sympathetic to the goals of the Russian Revolution but my initial
link to Bernal was through his book Social Function of Science[11]
which I read as a high school student.Much
later I learned of his interest in scientific information and the science
of science.When I joined the Johns
Hopkins University research group in 1951, I read his contribution to the
Proceedings of the 1947 Royal Society Information Conference.[12]
I met Bernal for the first time when he came to Washington for the 1958
International Conference on Scientific Information.In
Mikhailov�s paper for the ICSI Conference, it is significant that he cited
the earlier work of Bernal.[13]Bernal
was among the few people to whom I sent the earliest experimental printouts
of the SCI in 1962 � at the same time that I wrote to Professor
Derek deSolla Price, one of Bernal�s admirers, and to Professor Robert
K. Merton, the sociologist of science.As
a result of these contacts, Price,Merton
and his wife Professor Harriet Zuckerman became my mentors and close friends.
In
his ICSU paper, Professor Mikhailov acknowledged that as a relatively new
organization VINITI had not yet solved the problem of compiling indexes
to the Referatvnyi Zhurnali.That
may account for the interest in the SCI in the USSR.I
will never forget seeing the long line of readers waiting to use the SCI
at the Lenin Library!
In subsequent visits to
Moscow I presented co-citation analyses of Soviet and global science.This
seemed to me to be almost ironic because we were able to provide Soviet
scientists a unique view of their contribution to global science.Sometimes
they had not appreciated the high impact of Soviet science in certain areas
or how far behind they were in fields like genetics.
I have only mentioned a
few highlights of the ISI-VINITI connection, but I am sure it will open
the door to many questions which I will gladly answer.I
regret that neither Professor Mikhailov nor Professor Nalimov are here
to share this moment with us.I
am glad to see Dr. V. M. Sakharov, Vice Director of the Russian Academy
Library.I also want to acknowledge
Valentina Markusova. Her persistence led to my decision to make this journey.Last
but not least, I am happy to acknowledge my old friend and collaborator
from Vladivostok, Dr. Alexander Pudovkin.