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Using molecular formula for retrieval and citations of my work
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Using molecular formula for retrieval and citations of my work
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Index Chemicus was launched in 1960, okay. The contract for the genetic citation index, the grant was like maybe the same year, '61, '60 or '61, and then it was for a 3-year period that we did that. So, SCI, the '61 SCI was published in, what, late '63. And then we decided, on the basis of that, that we would launch a quarterly service, which started in January of '64. Index Chemicus by then was in its fourth year, and still hadn’t made a profit. It was at some point in the next few years that the four of us of the four horsemen of the apocalypse decided that you’re never going to make any money on this chemical information stuff, and we think you would be better off getting out of the company, and we’ll run it and we’ll make a profit. But, as you know, it took a long, long... they still have, I don’t know, they probably still now make money on it, but nobody ever tells me about it. I’m sure it wasn’t making much money at the end of my tenure on Index Chemicus. But the organic chemists loved it, and probably still do.
Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was an American scientist and publisher. In 1960 Garfield set up the Institute for Scientific Information which produced, among many other things, the Science Citation Index and fulfilled his dream of a multidisciplinary citation index. The impact of this is incalculable: without Garfield’s pioneering work, the field of scientometrics would have a very different landscape, and the study of scholarly communication would be considerably poorer.
Title: "Index Chemicus"
Listeners: Henry Small
Henry Small is currently serving part-time as a research scientist at Thomson Reuters. He was formerly the director of research services and chief scientist. He received a joint PhD in chemistry and the history of science from the University of Wisconsin. He began his career as a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics' Center for History and Philosophy of Physics where he served as interim director until joining ISI (now Thomson Reuters) in 1972. He has published over 100 papers and book chapters on topics in citation analysis and the mapping of science. Dr Small is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services, and past president of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. His current research interests include the use of co-citation contexts to understand the nature of inter-disciplinary versus intra-disciplinary science as revealed by science mapping.
Duration: 1 minute, 32 seconds
Date story recorded: September 2007
Date story went live: 23 June 2009