Eugene Garfield, Gr’61, a pioneer of citation analysis who served as a Penn Libraries overseer and established a residency in science librarianship, died on February 26 at the age of 91.

Dr. Garfield was born Eugene Garfinkle in New York City. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1949 and a master’s in library science in 1954, both from Columbia University, and a doctorate in structural linguistics from Penn in 1961.

Dr. Garfield’s career focused on the fields of information discovery and information recovery. He concocted the journal impact factor, a statistical framework that used citations to quantify the reach of a particular journal in a scientific community. He developed a number of bibliographic tools, including precursors of today’s Science Citation Index and founded the Institute for Scientific Information in 1960 to regularly publish the SCI. Dr. Garfield became chairman emeritus of the Institute for Scientific Information in 1993. Thomson Reuters acquired the ISI and its citation index for $210 million in 1992.

In 1986, Dr. Garfield founded The Scientist, a biweekly newspaper for research professionals that is now published as a magazine. He served as publisher and editor-in-chief from 1986-2000.

Dr. Garfield was appointed to Penn Libraries’ Board of Overseers in 1992 and served until 2011.

In 2010, Penn Libraries appointed its first Eugene Garfield Resident in Science Librarianship (Almanac March 2, 2010). Dr. Garfield established the residency to support the information literacy program in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

He held honorary doctorates from State University of New York, Thomas Jefferson University and Drexel University. He also was awarded honorary degrees from University of Rome in Italy, Charles University in the Czech Republic and Real Academia de Medicina del Distrito de Granada in Spain.

He is survived by his wife, Meher; three sons; a daughter; a stepdaughter; two granddaughters; and two great-grandchildren.