Eugene Garfield, distinguished in information management and scientific documentation, and Paul Preston, hispanist, awarded Honoris Causa by the University of Barcelona

Eugene Garfield.
Eugene Garfield.
Institutional
(08/06/2016)

Eugene Garfield, distinguished in the study of science through the analysis of scientific publications, and the historian Paul Preston, considered to be the most prestigious and influencer hispanist, will be awarded Honoris Causa Doctorate by the University of Barcelona in a ceremony on Thursday June 14, at 12 h, at the Paranimph of the Historical Building. Eugene Garfield, who will not attend the meeting due health issues, will send his speech recorded on video. His patron in the ceremony will be the lecturer of the Faculty of Library and Information Sciences, Cristòbal Urbano. The Professor from the Department of History and Archaeology Joan Villarroya will be Paul Prestonʼs patron in this event.

The event will be streamed via UBtv and will be available in this link.

Eugene Garfield.
Eugene Garfield.
Institutional
08/06/2016

Eugene Garfield, distinguished in the study of science through the analysis of scientific publications, and the historian Paul Preston, considered to be the most prestigious and influencer hispanist, will be awarded Honoris Causa Doctorate by the University of Barcelona in a ceremony on Thursday June 14, at 12 h, at the Paranimph of the Historical Building. Eugene Garfield, who will not attend the meeting due health issues, will send his speech recorded on video. His patron in the ceremony will be the lecturer of the Faculty of Library and Information Sciences, Cristòbal Urbano. The Professor from the Department of History and Archaeology Joan Villarroya will be Paul Prestonʼs patron in this event.

The event will be streamed via UBtv and will be available in this link.

 

Eugene Garfield, a life dedicated to the improvement of scientific information access


Eugene Garfield (New York, USA, September 16, 1925), distinguished man in scientific information and documentation, is internationally well known for being pioneer in considering citation as a key element to assess the quality of a scientific publication. Holding a degree in Chemistry at Columbia University (1949), his interest for tool creation to ease the recovery of scientific information started with his participation in the Welch Project, supported by the National Library of Medicine and elaborated in the John Hopkins University, which aimed to automatize indexing tasks and recovery of medical bibliography without human index intervention. During his participation, Garfield elaborated two fundamental ideas to improve the access to scientific information: content indexing allowing researchers being up to date in their knowledge field and quote indexing as a way of organization, access and assess for scientific bibliography. 

In his innovative vision creating tools for information recovery, Garfield puts together an entrepreneur spirit which takes him to commercialize bibliography guides in different scientific disciplines, the still existent Current Contents. Also, motivated by Joshua Lederberg, Nobel prize in Medicine in 1958, he is working on the creation of a quotation index in the field of genetics, an initiative which takes form in the publication, in 1963, of Science Citation Index, the first citation index, covering 613 magazines and 1.4 million of citations. This tool has information on the amount of times that an article has been cited and in which publications, so it allows people studying the impact of each article and find, by looking at the citation, related research studies.

Later on there are Social Science Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index, all of them commercialized by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), another commercial initiative by Garfield taken by Thomas Reuters in 1992. Garfield also established the Journal Impact Factor, a bibliometrics indicator which determines with which frequency the articles are cited in magazines, an indicator that gave place to a ranking of magazines published and entitled as Journal Citation Report.

Garfieldʼs work eased relationships between authors, ideas and texts in the fields of history and sociology of science. These texts have given birth to scientometrics as a scientific discipline. These contributions to science management and technology were fundamental to understand research assessment and the current decision-taking in science policies.

Recently, Garfieldʼs ideas were also applied to information recovery and algorithms such as Googleʼs PageRank use the theoretical model of citation index to analyse website links among the net and organize and list them in order of importance. 

Garfield has been honoured with several awards and distinctions by the American Society of Information Science, American Chemical Society or the Society for Technical Communication, and he is Honoris Causa Doctorate by the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata and the Charles University (Czech Republic).

 

Paul Preston and the critical spirit 
 

Paul Preston (Liverpool, 1946) studied at Oriel College (Oxford) and the University of Reading. He taught Modern History in Queen Mary College (1975-91) and has been Professor of International History, since 1991, at the London School of Economics where he directs Cañada Centre for Contemporary Studies. Apart from his research task, his critical spirit and defending of rights has also been distinguished.

Out of all his publications the most outstanding ones are Franco. “Caudillo de España”; The Spanish holocaust: inquisition and extermination during the civil war and after, or The Spanish Civil War: reaction, revolution and revenge. He has always been interested in History characters, as it can be seen in the books Juan Carlos. A peopleʼs king, or in The last Stalinist: the life of Santiago Carrillo. He got close to characters collectively like in the biographies that appear in the books Las tres Españas del 36, Palomas de Guerra or Idealistes sota les bales. Likewise, other works that stand out are The Coming of the Spanish Civil War: reform, reaction and revolution in the Second Republic, 1931-36, Spain, the ECC and NATO, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, The politics of revenge. Facism and the military in twentieth-century Spain and Comrades! Portraits of the Spanish Civil War.

He is member of the Royal Historical Society since 1982. In 1986 he was given the award Encomienda de la Orden del Mérito Civil by King Juan Carlos I for his services to Spain, he is member of the British Academy since 1994 and member of the California Institute of International Studies since 1996. Preston is also member of the European Academy of Yuste Foundation. In 2000 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 2007 Knight of the Great Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic.

In Catalonia, he is member of the Institute for Catalan Studies since 2008. He was awarded the International Ramon Llull Award in 2006, given by the Generalitat de Catalunya for his historiography contributions of our past. He has been distinguished with the Trias Fargas Award in 2006 for his book Idealistes sota les bales, and with History Award Santiago Sobrequés for his book Lʼholocaust espanyol. In 2012 he was given the award Pompeu Fabra, in the category of projection and dissemination of the Catalan language. In 2015 he was awarded Honoris Causa Doctorate, by Universitat Rovira i Virgili and then by the University of Valencia.

Preston has kept several contacts in the Spanish and Catalan universities, specifically in the University of Barcelona. Therefore he has maintained bonds with lecturers of the University of Barcelona such as Gabriel Cardona, Mary Nash, Pelai Pagés, Susanna Tavera, Andreu Mayayo and Antoni Segura. The Centre for International History Studies of the UB, with the collaboration of CRAI, managed the transfer of Prestonʼs important documentation to the Poblet monastery, where it has been guarded.