Pennants for Garfield: bibliometrics and document retrieval

Abstract

Eugene Garfield’s name, like that of any prolific author, can designate both an oeuvre and a person. That duality is explored here with pennant diagrams, a decade-old technique that can structure information about both oeuvres and persons in one scatterplot. Such diagrams are not readily made now, but may have a place in recommender systems of the future. This paper recapitulates the basics of creating and understanding them. In pennants, every term in a bibliometric distribution is weighted with a version of the TF * IDF formula from information retrieval. The distributions are generated by a seed term, such as a cited author’s name or a subject phrase, and consist of terms that co-occur with the seed in a database. TF * IDF orders the terms by relevance and specificity with respect to the seed—an outcome interpretable in light of relevance theory from linguistic pragmatics. Garfield’s name appears illustratively as a seed in one pennant and as a co-cited author in five others. Another example shows works by him and others that co-occur with the phrase “Citation Analysis” in Scisearch. Pennants are richly suggestive about authors, and here they are linked to a fruitful idea of Garfield’s that appeared in his first paper.