Guest
Американский учёный, издатель и один из основоположников наукометрии Юджин Гарфилд (1925–2017) делится воспоминаниями о В. В. Налимове, чьи книги он издал в США, и др. советском учёном. Упоминается и супруга Налимова Жанна Дрогалина. [Интервьюер: Генри Смолл; дата записи: 2007] The American scientist and publisher Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was one of the initiators of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He founded the Institute for Scientific Information which has produced many citation indices. [Listener: Henry Small; date recorded: 2007] TRANSCRIPT: I think I had somehow gotten over to VINITI to meet the people there, Nalimov may have been there, but George Vladutz remembered me from that. He didn’t introduce himself, but he had been there. Later he wrote to me. When he emigrated from Russia, which was a difficult thing for them to do, he wound up... the Jewish people who left Moscow went through Rome, and from Rome he called me or cabled me that he was there and we tried to help him out in some way, and eventually it worked out he came here, he worked for us. But he was the Russian authority on organic notation systems, research in literature and so forth. He remembered my visit in ’61, I remember that; so, that’s how we got to know George. And he was a character in himself too. God, he was weird. When Beta Starchild was working here I had people say, ’Do you think George Vladutz is a KGB agent or something like that, you know he’s such a peculiar guy?’ Because the way the Russians, if you live in a society like that you become so paranoid, I think, about the way people behave. He was so political, you know, everything he did was manipulative. There’s a certain bureaucratic approach to things he has, and other people I won’t mention that we know that behaved that way. So, anyhow. But I think Nalimov had worked at VINITI at some point. I don’t know the exact sequence because he had been in a gulag for about 15 years as, I think... his family had a history of religious protest and what have you. It’s all, it’s all documented. And his wife is, I think, publishing a translation of his autobiography, or something like that. He then, being a polymath, and being a brilliant statistician and mathematician, quickly caught onto the idea of, you know, the use of measurement in science policy, and that’s how he invented the word ’scientometrics’. As we’ve mentioned many times, it was eventually that document, that book was translated by some government agency, I don’t know whether it was the CIA or whoever, they never put their name on anything, but it was available free as a document, a technical report. It was not cited all that much because it wasn’t being disseminated widely. But because of the east-west connection in Hungary, Tibor Braun picked up on that, and Nalimov was an early member of the board, and you and I were on the board early on, and Derek, and that’s how he picked up the word scientometrics, directly taken from the title of the book. So, it’s, it’s just basically it was an appropriate synonym for science of science, which was a very awkward term, I think. That would never fly in English; it’s just too repetitive to say science of science. What the hell does that mean, you know. It’s just the application of measurement to social science policy, science policy studies. Video published on YouTube: Original: ;jsessionid=9546A60D05F76CEC35A470EC9195338F
