A scientometric analysis and visualization of the 50 highly cited papers of Eugene Garfield

Abstract

Eugene Garfield’s contributions to global informetrics and scientometrics literature is significant. In this paper, a scientometric analysis of Eugene Garfield’s 50 highly cited papers is performed. His papers were published in 32 journals including top-ranked journals such as Nature and Science. The top 15 keywords with the strongest citation bursts from 1989 to 2009 and references with strong citation bursts are presented. Co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis based on source journals using VOSviewer were carried out. The result revealed that keywords 'citation relationship', 'scientific journals', 'biological journal’ and 'self-citations' started to burst/hotspot in 2002. The term 'citation analysis' has the highest number of four years' popularity as citation burst. The study further revealed that the top 50 publications of Eugene Garfield gained 8441 citations of the total citations of 9121 from 254 published documents. Garfield has Total Link Strength of 35 and has received 8511 citations which comes to 93.31% of the total citations and proved his dominance over the collaborators. Ninety percent of the papers (45) published in the USA and above 92% of the citations (8419) were also received from the USA's publications. Just five papers in three journals received 4856 citations (53.23%) of the total 9121 citations. These three journals include three papers in Science (with 3027); one each in Journal of the American Medical Association (with 1323 citations) and The Canadian Medical Association Journal (with 606 citations).