The Web of Science Group, a Clarivate Analytics company, has named Dr. Erjia Yan as the recipient of the 2019 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis, at the 17th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics in Rome.
This award recognises scientists who work on innovative approaches to citation analysis which improve how the impact of scientific research is measured. This field of study, also known as scientometrics, was pioneered by Dr Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information.
Scientometrics shapes the future of scientific discovery by helping governments, funding bodies and universities assess the impact of their work and investments, enabling them to allocate funding accordingly. It can also provide researchers with insights regarding the impact of their research, and the wider field.
In 2017 and 2019, the Eugene Garfield award has focused on early career researchers (in 2018 it was open to researchers at all career stages). This year’s recipient, Dr. Erjia Yan is Associate Professor of Information Science at the Drexel University College of Computing and Informatics. Dr. Yan will use the award to examine semi-structured or unstructured bibliometric fields, including titles, abstracts and keywords (as opposed to the traditional units, journal associations or authorship) to make sense of bibliometric indicators and numbers. His research will help to provide a vital empirical foundation for many facets of scientific activity, such as the promotion of innovation; better and more transparent science policymaking; and the development of an equitable and sustainable scientific workforce.
Dr. Yan will receive $25,000 of unrestricted prize money and access to the Web of Science, the world’s largest publisher-neutral citation index. Dr. Yan will also have the opportunity to collaborate with the prestigious Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was originally established in 1960 by Dr. Eugene Garfield. The ISI focuses on the development of existing and new scientometric approaches.
As a pioneer in automated indexing and retrieval of information, Dr. Eugene Garfield developed numerous citation databases which have changed how scientists search and assess scholarly literature. These include Web of Science, which indexes the contents and the citation network of the world’s premier scientific and scholarly journals and proceedings, and Journal Citation Reports, which provides Journal Impact Factors and other citation metrics describing the influence of journals and how they are related to one another. These are just two of Garfield’s unprecedented, valuable, and enduring inventions. Dr. Garfield had many interests related to information science and technology, but one of the key threads across all of them is citation indexing and analysis and its impact on information retrieval, research assessment, and the study of the science of science.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
