This year we mourn the losses of Jorge Charum and Eugene Garfield. Professor Charum left a greatly relevant legacy to our national scientific system, being one of the pioneering scholars of scientific production in our country and one of the first to explore the relationship between knowledge producers and users (
Understanding the social dynamics of knowledge production in socio-technical networks not only reveals their cognitive products but also the multiple relationships amongst the intervening groups. Professor Charum was also interested in measurement systems of the national scientific production, and that interest led him to make significant contributions to the Publindex journal assessment system and to the process of measuring groups and research centers. Despite the criticisms, these assessment systems made researchers change their scholarly practices and influenced the ways in which we conceive the impacts of our research work. This work, naturally, goes beyond knowledge artifacts such as patents, papers, books, and the like, and extends towards true societal impact.
This year we also lost one of the most relevant researchers in the field of Scientometrics: Professor Eugene Garfield, who started his training in Chemistry but ended up getting his doctorate in Linguistics and declared himself a scientist of information. According to
Charum and Garfield came from distinct intellectual traditions. Charum worked from Latour’s and Callon’s sociology of science, whereas Garfield’s work stemmed from a more traditional sociology of science proposed by Merton and Pierce. Despite this difference, it is clear that their contributions, Charum’s in the Colombian context and Garfield’s at an international level, transformed the practices of scientific communities and the ways in which we regard scientific production, communication, and impact.