A black and white photograph showing Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) posing with his book, Essays of an Information Scientist: 1962-1973 (Philadelphia, 1977). Garfield wrote more than 1,500 essays throughout his career which were compiled in the 15-volume series, Essays of an Information Scientist. The essays reflect his own interests as well as topics of interest to a wide audience; he wrote about medical issues, jazz, art, food, and recreation, but he also discussed citation indexing, new information technologies, Nobel Prizes, scientific publishing, and cultural institutions.

Eugene Garfield was a prominent American information scientist and pioneer in the field of scientometrics. He was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), a renowned academic publishing service that offered scientometric and bibliographic database services and specialized in citation index and analysis. Garfield was also the inventor of the Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Current Contents, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. These inventions provided an objective and quantitative basis for analyzing information flow in scientific communication and fostered the growth of the field of scientometrics.