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What is the primordial reference for ...?—Redux

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Abstract

Eugene Garfield’s quest of the primordial reference for the familiar and ubiquitous phrase ‘Publish or Perish’ led him to a 1942 monograph (The Scientist, 10(12):11, 1996). This quest is resumed two decades later here. Text mining applied to a sample of the mainstream and academic literature ever published, as well as crowdsourcing, yielded earlier references dating from 1934 and 1927. This search experiment suggests that ‘primordial reference chasing’ in full-text corpora remains an open problem for the community intersecting bibliometrics and information retrieval. Addressing it has the potential to rejuvenate Garfield’s work on historio-bibliography to improve our understanding of the genesis and diffusion of ideas, concepts, and associated metaphors.

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Notes

  1. http://dfr.jstor.org/?helpview=about_dfr.

  2. https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish.

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Publish_or_perish&diff=prev&oldid=735106196.

  4. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qBAZAAAAIAAJ&q=%22publish+or+perish%22.

  5. Disclaimer: the references provided here are not necessarily primordial references.

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  1. Computer Science Department, IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS, University of Toulouse, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse cedex 9, France

    Guillaume Cabanac

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  1. Guillaume Cabanac
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Cabanac, G. What is the primordial reference for ...?—Redux. Scientometrics 114, 481–488 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2595-4

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