Recipient of Eugene Garfield Award 2021 Announced

NISO Member News

London, UK | September 13, 2021

 Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today named Elena Pallari, Department of Clinical Trials and Methodology, University College London, U.K., as the recipient of the 2021 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis. The award was announced at the 25th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2021) by Dr. Gali Halevi, Director of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)™ at Clarivate.

Launched in 2017, the award recognizes early-career scientists developing innovative approaches to citation analysis that improve how the impact of scientific research is measured. This field of study, also known as scientometrics, was pioneered by Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information.

UCL postgraduate researcher Elena Pallari has been recognized for her research proposal to evaluate research outputs of the UK Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit over the last 20 years – during which time it published 2,548 papers, as indexed in the Web of Science™ – and to develop a framework to assess the impact of its methodology papers. Her work will also evaluate how progress in the design, conduct and analysis of clinical trials has improved clinical practice for patients. This type of work in health sciences is especially relevant amidst a global pandemic when clinical trials are conducted at enormous speed.

Elena Pallari, University College London, said: “The goal of my research is to find a way to collectively assess and examine the research citation patterns of highly cited methodological papers in clinical research. Those in my field know that new methodological developments can have little or no impact on new clinical studies or further methods or research, and the rate of change can be particularly slow. This makes capturing methodological research impact incredibly important in order to be able to measure and improve influence on funding, policy, practice and health outcomes.

“I am hopeful that my research will make a difference in clinical research assessment across all of these spaces by uncovering new data around methodological impact and ultimately improving the way clinical studies are designed, conducted and analysed.”

Pallari will receive $25,000 of unrestricted prize money and access to the Web of Science, the world’s largest publisher-neutral citation index. She will also be invited to collaborate with the current citation analysts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information, established in 1960 by Dr. Eugene Garfield.

Dr. Gali Halevi, Director at the Institute for Scientific Information, Clarivate said: “We are very pleased to present Ms. Pallari with the 2021 Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis. Her proposal is innovative, original and shows great potential for real-world impact in its future use by clinicians, statisticians, regulators and policymakers. We truly need an accurate and efficient way to learn from past trials and quickly adopt and adjust them in order to speed up medical advances, which is what Ms. Pallari’s work aims to do.

“This is exactly the kind of innovation we look to recognise with this award, and very much in keeping with the work the ISI has pioneered. We are thrilled to recognize Ms. Pallari amongst the most promising academics in the research community and we look forward to seeing how her work will uphold the ISI tradition of innovation in citation analysis.”

The ISI focuses on the development of existing and new scientometric approaches. Scientometrics shapes the future of scientific discovery by helping governments, funding bodies and universities assess the impact of their work and investments, enabling them to allocate funding accordingly.  It can also provide researchers with insights regarding the impact of their research, and the wider field.

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