more more on Precedents for Google's search patent

[Dave Farber <farber () trial danger net>]

-----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. The
misconceptions 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 its
fundamental 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
l

In 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 1967
http://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 a
complete 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.org
Past 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

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