Galton 2011 revisited: a bibliometric journey in the footprints of a universal genius

Commemorating the 100th death anniversary of Francis Galton, this paper is a bibliometric impact analysis of the works of this outstanding scientist and predecessor of scientometrics. Citation analysis was done in Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar (Publish or Perish) in order to retrieve the most cited books and journal articles. Additionally references were identified where Galton was rather mentioned than cited in order to analyze the phenomenon of obliteration by incorporation. Finally occurrence counts of Galton’s works in obituaries, Festschrift, the website Galton.org, major encyclopaedias and biographical indexes were compared to citation counts. As an outcome Galton’s works are increasingly cited or mentioned. Obliteration (use of eponyms) applies to one-third of Galton’s works and seems to be typical for fields like mathematics or statistics, whereas citations are more common in psychology. The most cited books and journal articles are also the most mentioned with remarkable correlation. Overall citation analysis and occurrence counting are complementary useful methods for the impact analysis of the works of “giants”.