Dr. Jian Wang selected as recipient of the inaugural Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis

My colleagues here at Clarivate Analytics and I are pleased to announce today that the recipient of the first Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation In Citation Analysis is Dr. Jian Wang, Assistant Professor in the Science Based Business Program, Faculty of Science, at Leiden University, The Netherlands. In this post, I want to briefly describe the award created in honor of Dr. Garfield and to introduce Jian’s research program. You can find the press release here.

 

The Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis

In the 1960s, Eugene Garfield pioneered the practice of citation analysis and infometrics in the scholarly literature with the creation of the Science Citation Index, subsequently developing additional citation databases that changed how scientists find and assess scholarly literature. These databases now form the core of Clarivate Analytics Web of Science, which indexes the contents of the world’s premier scientific and scholarly journals and captures the most complete citation network between the publications within these journals. Garfield’s innovative resource has been used for more than a half century by researchers seeking the best research papers in their disciplines, and by administrators seeking to understand the impact of journals and the evolution of ideas captured in the literature, as well as to evaluate the research performance of universities, government programs and researchers.

Garfield had an outsized, global influence on scientists and scholars – not just through access to the databases that he and his team painstakingly developed, but also in providing his time and energy to support scientists from all over the world, as a partner or mentor. He had many interests related to information technology, but one of the key threads across all of them is citation analysis and its impact on information retrieval, research assessment and the study of the science of science.

After Garfield’s death early this year, we established the Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis to honor this legacy of generosity and support for scientists around the world. The competition was open to early-career researchers from any country and included a one-time $25,000 USD award and access to the Web of Science citation indexes. After the call for applications closed this summer, a panel of internal and external reviewers sifted through the applications and ideas. We were pleased with the response rate and the wide variety of investigations using Web of Science citation data. The applications were of high quality and focused on important problems in information retrieval, research assessment and the science of science. About a half dozen submissions reflected the creativity that Dr. Garfield exhibited in his long career; these were reviewed in great detail by the panel on the basis of novelty and innovation.

Although only one award recipient could be selected, the panelists felt that two other applications merited some level of support as Honorable Mentions. Read more about these two investigators in this blog post.

 

Dr. Jian Wang: Structure and Dynamics of Science of Effective Science Policy

Dr. Jian Wang, Assistant Professor at the Science Based Business Program, Faculty of Science, Leiden University in the Netherlands, was selected for the award among many creative, high-quality applications. Jian received his PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013, and was recently a fellow at Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program. He has also held appointments at Center for R&D Monitoring (ECOOM) and Department of Managerial Economics, Strategy & Innovation, KU Leuven, Belgium, and the Center for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.

Jian’s research uses large databases and advanced statistics to reveal the structures and dynamics underlying science and technology, with the resulting insights useful for designing more effective science and innovation policy. His recent work explores both the citing behavior of novel research and how this work is cited, contributing to the important discussion of how bibliometric indicators can be enhanced to better identify and assess novel and creative scholarship. Jian is also interested in the translation of science into innovation, and he uses references to scientific literature from within patents to explore this process and to examine the conditions needed for successful translation at individual, team and network levels.

We look forward to working closely with Jian over the coming year as he builds his independent research program. We anticipate that his work will have a significant impact on the scientific community just as Dr. Garfield’s innovations did.