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more more on Precedents for Google's search patent
From: Dave Farber <farber () trial danger net>
Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 18:05:22 -0500
-----Original Message----- From: Garfield, Eugene <Garfield () codex cis upenn edu> To: 'dave () farber net' <dave () farber net> Subject: RE: [IP] more on Precedents for Google's search patent Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 17:44:54 -0500 Dear Dave: I am amused by some of the comments you have received. Themisconceptions about the origins of the Science Citation Index is even more amusing. SCI was not developed originally for the informetric purposes it is now often used for. It is a tool for information retrieval. I met the people
at Shepard's Citations in 1954 but they did not have a clue as to itsfundamental character as a network of citations. They of course did not
index literature, but case law.The idea of the literature as a topological network did not emerge until we began experiments on the Genetics Citation Index in the early sixties, five
years after my first paper in Science in 1955.Garfield, E. "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas." " Science, 122(3159), p.108-11, July 1955.
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/science_v122(3159)p108y1955.htm lIn 1964 Irv Sher and I showed how citation networks could be used to create
historiographs. http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/useofcitdatawritinghistofsci.pd f We now have developed programs for this kind of algorithmic historiography.The idea of a graph theoretic structure was formalized when my brother Ralph
Garner did his Master's Thesis at Drexel in 1967http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/rgarner.pdf COMPUTER-ORIENTED GRAPH
THEORETIC ANALYSIS OF CITATION INDEX STRUCTURES.I often discussed this work with Saul Gorn when I taught the course in IR at
the Penn Moore School.I believe that it was Bill Arms, now at Cornell, who first pointed out to me
the link between Google and the Science Citation Index which began, I believe, when the founders of Google were at Stanford. If there is acomplete history of the evolution of Google I would like to see it. Gene
Eugene Garfield, PhD. email garfield () codex cis upenn edu tel 215-243-2205 fax 215-387-1266 President, The Scientist www.the-scientist.com Chairman Emeritus, ISI www.isinet.com home page: www.eugenegarfield.orgPast President, American Society for Information Science and Technology
(ASIS&T) www.asis.org -----Original Message----- From: Dave Farber [mailto:farber () trial danger net] Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2003 10:29 AM To: ip ip Subject: [IP] more on Precedents for Google's search patent -----Original Message----- From: Peter D. Junger <junger () samsara law cwru edu> To: dave () farber net CC: junger () samsara law cwru edu Subject: Precedents for Google's search patent Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 10:21:06 -0500 For the IP list, if you think it suitable. "John Shoch" writes: : Google deserves tremendous credit for building a great search site. : But let's be clear that the basic underlying concept has been around for : a long time, in the world of hard-copy journal papers. : Those papers have references, which we can think of as links going out : of each document. : But a set of publications known as The Citation Index inverts that data : base of links, to find out which papers are most frequently referenced : by other research papers. And The Citation Index, in turn, is relatively new. The idea of such indices was developed by the legal profession in Common Law countries, including England and the United States, in order to keep track of the status of reported judicial decisions (which ``precedents'' are the textual basis for the Common Law). In the United States the leading example of such a citator is Shepard's Citations. For each reported case in various reporters, a legal citator will report on (all) subsequent cases where the reported case has been affirmed, reversed, overruled, followed, or criticized. If a case is frequently followed, it becomes known to the legal profession as a ``leading case'' and leading cases tend in turn to be more frequently cited. Shepard's Citations, by the way, cover not only judicial decisions but also law review articles. --Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland,
OH EMAIL: junger () samsara law cwru edu URL: http://samsara.law.cwru.edu NOTE: junger () pdj2-ra f-remote cwru edu no longer exists --farber ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as garfield () aurora cis upenn edu To unsubscribe or update your address, click http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ipArchives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more more on Precedents for Google's search patent Dave Farber (Mar 01)