• 2006
• Domain Map
• Exhibit map

Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), introduced “The Use of Citation Data in Writing the History of Science” in 1964. Forty years later, his HistCite™ tool at www.histcite.com automatically generates chronological tables and historiographs of topical paper collections. It helps researchers, librarians, and others to identify core papers on a topic in question; to understand the impact of specific authors, papers, and journals; and to make sense of the history of old and new research topics. The HistCite™ tables support the interactive display and permit the sorting of papers chronologically as well as by journal, volume, issue number and page, and citation scores. The historiographic view reveals citation patterns among major core papers. Nodes in the graph represent papers and are displayed in chronological order. Node sizes denote the relative number of citations each core paper has received. Edges represent citation linkages. The graph in the left shows Garfield’s 1964 manually compiled historiograph of key articles in the history of DNA from Gregor Mendel in 1865, to Marshall Nirenberg in 1961, to the Watson-Crick Paper on the helical structure of DNA in 1953. It is contrasted with an automatically generated HistCite™ graph of key papers citing the 1953 primordial Watson-Crick paper shown on the right.