Eugene Garfield and Paul Preston awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Barcelona
The University of Barcelona has awarded the honorary doctorate to Eugene Garfield, a key role in the fields of scientific information and documentation, and to Paul Preston, considered one of the most prestigious and influent spanicist worldwide, in an institutional event presided by the Rector, Dídac Ramírez, held today June 14, in the Paranimph of the Historical Building of the University of Barcelona. Garfieldʼs nomination has been sponsored by the lecturer of the Faculty of Library and Information Sciences, and Prestonʼs has been sponsored by Professor Joan Villarroya, from the Faculty of Geography and History.
The Rector Dídac Ramírez, who presided the event, highlighted that the two academics awarded with the honorary doctorate are “great scientific prominent figures in their respective fields”. He emphasized on Garfieldʼs innovative personality and described him as “a total forefather of the bibliographic organization tools through indexes based on citations, decades ago, when memory capacity and computing power made the hardest task of research to be assumed by the researcher”. About Preston, the rector said that “he helped us facing our history, he put us in front of the mirror, an activity which is not always easy”. He made reference to the referendum in Great Britain about their permanency in the European Union, and said that “Europeʼs idea is still needed but we are involved in a deep debate on where the Union has to turn to”.
The University of Barcelona has awarded the honorary doctorate to Eugene Garfield, a key role in the fields of scientific information and documentation, and to Paul Preston, considered one of the most prestigious and influent spanicist worldwide, in an institutional event presided by the Rector, Dídac Ramírez, held today June 14, in the Paranimph of the Historical Building of the University of Barcelona. Garfieldʼs nomination has been sponsored by the lecturer of the Faculty of Library and Information Sciences, and Prestonʼs has been sponsored by Professor Joan Villarroya, from the Faculty of Geography and History.
The Rector Dídac Ramírez, who presided the event, highlighted that the two academics awarded with the honorary doctorate are “great scientific prominent figures in their respective fields”. He emphasized on Garfieldʼs innovative personality and described him as “a total forefather of the bibliographic organization tools through indexes based on citations, decades ago, when memory capacity and computing power made the hardest task of research to be assumed by the researcher”. About Preston, the rector said that “he helped us facing our history, he put us in front of the mirror, an activity which is not always easy”. He made reference to the referendum in Great Britain about their permanency in the European Union, and said that “Europeʼs idea is still needed but we are involved in a deep debate on where the Union has to turn to”.
Garfield, “Googleʼs godfather” and much more
Eugene Garfield (New York, USA, September 16, 1925), important figure in the analysis of scientific information and documentation, is internationally distinguished for being pioneer in considering citation as a fundamental element to assess the quality of a scientific publication. Garfield elaborated two basic ideas to improve the access to scientific information: the index in the table of content, which allows researchers to be updated on their knowledge areas, and the citation indexes, as a way of organizing and assessing scientific bibliography.
Apart from this innovative vision in the creation of tools to manage information, the entrepreneur spirit of Garfield brought him to commercialize bibliographic guidelines about different scientific disciplines, the still existent current contents. Simultaneously, and encouraged by Joshua Lederberg, Medicine Nobel Prize in 1958, he worked on the creation of a citation index in the field of genetics, an initiative he made definite in 1963 with the publication of Science Citation Index, the first citation index in this field, which collected 613 magazines and 1,4 million citations. The works by Garfield have also helped the analysis of relations between authors, ideas and texts in the fields of history and sociology of science. Scientometry was born from this as a scientific discipline. These contributions to the management of science and technology have been essential to understand the assessment of research and the current decision-taking in scientific policies.
Garfield, who wasnʼt able to attend the event due to health issues and sent his intervention via video, focused his investiture speech to analyse the evolution Science Citation Index (SCI) made to Web of Science and its relation with Google, since these ideas have also been applied in the fields of information recovery and algorithms, like Googleʼs PageRank uses the theoretical model of the citation indexes to analyse website links and order them according to their relevance. It wasnʼt “just because” that a North-American librarian referred to Garfield as “Googleʼs godfather”.
In his speech, Garfield made reference to his article “Citation indexes for science: a new dimension in documentation through the association of ideas”, published in the journal Science in 1955. He considers it to be the most significant paper out of all the ones he wrote, albeit not being the most cited. Regarding SCI, he said it is “a standard tool in the hands of science policy analysts and others interested in evaluation, including those who like to play parlour games predicting Nobel Prizes”. “However, the SCI is now not only considered in predicting Nobel Prizes. It is considered essential in libraries and elsewhere, but also sufficiently popular to engender competition from Elsevier, the worldʼs largest journal publisher, as well as Google Scholar”. He actually highlighted that “Googleʼs technological success as a search engine is based on its citation ranking process”.
In his laudatory speech, the patron Cristóbal Urbano highlighted that “lecturers, students and researchers use organization tools from the scientific bibliography elaborated out of these ideas, projects or products by Garfield- daily”. He also put emphasis on “the ideas, and Garfieldʼs determination, are behind the consolidation of the citation indexes, the influence of which gets to the searching engines we use every day and that use the links among websites as a certain equal tool to citations in order to order the websites according to their relevance” and highlighted that “the singularity of Garfieldʼs contribution lies within the combination of a concept from which there were precedents (indexing via citation), in a new context (the exponential growth of the scientific bibliography), and this in a systematic way in a pilot experiment (thanks to a new technology, the emerging computer science from the late 50s and early 60s)”. At the end, Urbano emphasized that Garfieldʼs contribution in science management has to be taken into account because, according to Urbano, citation analysis is nowadays a standard approximation to the realization of science evaluation tasks and in this sense, he added “Eugene Garfield has been the first to allege the usual abusive or wrong use of this approximation, in lots of cases due to a wrong use of the Impact Factor”, although “the excess of indiscriminate and automatized application of the bibliometric indicators are not the result of the existence of bibliographic database with citation data, but of a ranking culture which, mixed with insufficient economic means to carry out good people and project evaluations, ends up prioritizing an evaluation made by the impact of the journals where research results are published, instead of the value of each project or in metric indicators”.
Paul Prestonʼs “The strange fascination for Barcelona”
In his speech as honorary doctorate by the University of Barcelona, Paul Preston told how his academic career took him closer to “Barcelona, Catalonia, and this University”. He remembered his stay after graduating in Oxford, at the University of Reading, where he coursed a course on the Spanish Civil War with Hugh Tomas. “I started reading -without stopping- about the Spanish Civil War and it looked more interesting than any other period I had studied before”, he said. “This historic conflict was a Pandoraʼs box: it allowed me studying communism, anarchism, socialism, freemasonry and liberal democracy as well as characters such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini , Trotsky, Leon Blum and Neville Chamberlain, apart from a great amount of Spanish characters too” he continued.
Preston mentioned his stays and experiences in Spain in the Francoist dictatorship. As a major historian in Spanish contemporary history, he commented on the Government of the Second Republic: “the attraction I felt for that democratic government grew as I developed my research on social injustice in Spain and while I saw how normal people had suffered from the incredible cruelties of the war to defend a democratic system which made a lot of work for womenʼs rights, education and social welfare. Coming from a Liverpool working class neighbourhood, the most logical was to be against fascism”. He has defined himself as a social historian but at the same time he admitted “my true vocation -if thatʼs the actual word- is that of biographer”.
Preston talked about his relation with Barcelona, for which he always felt “a strange fascination”. “For me, Barcelona is a curious mix: for one part, anti-Francoist opposition, football and militant working class; on the other, style and civilization”. He also talked about his bonds with Catalan historians, and made reference to his taking of office facing polemic topics such as his opinion in favour of the return of the Salamanca papers to Catalonia.
Professor Joan Villarroya said in his laudatory speech that in his work, Preston embraces the totality of the most relevant and debated topics of the Spanish history of the 20th Century and emphasized on the critical thinking and fight for freedom. Villarroya remembered Prestonʼs origins, in a humble Liverpool family- to comment on his academic career and his main works. He also commented on the relation between Preston and the Catalan historians and made reference to the fact that the Historical Centre of International Studies of the University of Barcelona, in collaboration with CRAI, managed the transfer of Prestonʼs important documentary collection to the Poblet monastery. He finished his speech stating that Preston has been linked to Catalonia “as a free and committed citizen: he has defended the Catalan language and culture, has defended the return of our papers and our freedom of decision as a community”. “He has done so without thinking in the consequences, just because as I repeat, he acts as a committed citizen and historian, so he had to do it”, he said.
Since 1991, Paul Preston is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, where he directs the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies. Apart from his research task, he is well-known for his critical spirit and defence of freedom. He is author of a great amount of publications, among which the most distinguished 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. Like he himself said during his speech, Preston has always been interested in the main characters of the history, as it can be seen in the books Juan Carlos: a peopleʼs king, or El zorro rojo: la vida de Santiago Carrillo. He also got closer to those people in a collective way like in the bibliographies that appear in the books Las tres Españas del 36, Palomas de Guerra or Idealistes sota les bales. Likewise, his other works are worth mentioning: The coming of the Spanish Civil War: reform, reaction and revolution in the Second Republic, 1931-36, Spain, the EEC AND NATO; The triumph of democracy in Spain; The politics of revenge. Fascism and the military in twentieth-century Spain, and Comrades! Portraits of the Spanish Civil War.
He has been member of the Royal History Society since 1982. In 1986, King Juan Carlos I gave him the award Encomienda de la Orden del Mérito Civil for his services to Spain, he has been member of the British Academy since 1994 and member of the California Institute of International Studies since 1996. He is also member of the European Academy of Yuste since 2006. In 200 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. Preston has strong ties with Catalonia. He has been member of the Institute for Catalan Studies since 2008. He was awarded the International Ramon Llull Award in 2005 by the Generalitat de Catalunya for his histographic contributions about our past. Likewise, he was awarded in 2006 with the Ramon Trias Fargas Award for his book Idealistes sota les bales and in 2011 with the History Award Santiago Sobrequés for Holocaust 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 Honorary doctorate by the Universitat Rovira i Virgily and then by the University of Valencia.