Eugene Garfield on the Web in 2001

This paper reports on the results of an extensive search for information on Eugene Garfield on the World Wide Web. The searches took place in August 2001, using the search terms: “Eugene Garfield”, “Garfield Eugene”, “Gene Garfield”, “E. Garfield” and “Garfield E”. The five major search engines at that time were queried. 9711 different URLs were identified, out of which 4120 were related to Eugene Garfield, the information scientist. About 25% of these pages were characterized using the method of content analysis. The pages were classified into multiple facets: theme, substantiality, page type, publisher, creator, language, domain and site. The findings show that the most frequently mentioned themes (not surprisingly) were the use and theory of citation analysis, the Citation Indexes as products, the Impact Factor and the use of JCR data. Over 50% of the pages were scientific in nature and more than a third of the pages formally cited Garfield’s work. The findings based on the 2001 dataset were not published before.