Eugene Garfield and Algorithmic Historiography: Co-Words, Co-Authors, and Journal Names

Algorithmic historiography was proposed by Eugene Garfield in collaboration with Irving Sher in the 1960s, but further developed only recently into HistCiteTM with Alexander Pudovkin. As in history writing, HistCiteTM reconstructs by drawing intellectual lineages. In addition to cited references, however, documents can be attributed a multitude of other variables such as title words, keywords, journal names, author names, and even full texts. New developments in multidimensional scaling (MDS) enable us not only to visualize these patterns at each moment of time, but also to animate them over time. Using title words, co-authors, and journal names in Garfield’s oeuvre, the method is demonstrated and further developed in this paper (and in the animation at http://www.leydesdorff.net/garfield/animation). The variety and substantive content of the animation enables us to write, visualize, and animate the author’s intellectual history.