Eugene Eli Garfield (September 16, 1925 – February 26, 2017)[2][3] was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics.

[5][6][7][8] Garfield was born in 1925 in New York City as Eugene Eli Garfinkle,[2] his mother being of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.

[1][15] Working as a laboratory assistant at Columbia University after his graduation, Garfield indexed all previously synthesized compounds so that not to remake them, which helped him understand that his inclination to information towards science was bigger than towards chemistry.

[19] The creation of the Science Citation Index made it possible to calculate impact factor,[20] which ostensibly measures the importance of scientific journals.

[21][22] His entrepreneurial flair in having turned what was, at least at the time, an obscure and specialist metric into a highly profitable business has been noted.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin acknowledged Gene in their development of PageRank, the algorithm that powers their company's search engine.

69, Winter 2007, David Colquhoun of the Department of Pharmacology, University College London, described the "impact factor," a method for comparing scholarly journals, as "the invention of Eugene Garfield, a man who has done enormous harm to true science."

Colquhoun ridiculed C. Hoeffel's assertion that Garfield's impact factor "has the advantage of already being in existence and is, therefore, a good technique for scientific evaluation" by saying, "you can't get much dumber than that.