Eugene Garfield repeatedly warned that impact-factor metrics are unfit for judging individual researchers — the exact misuse later found in the Saudi affiliation scheme

Eugene Garfield, who devised the Journal Impact Factor out of the citation infrastructure he built at the Institute for Scientific Information, repeatedly warned against the very use to which it was later put. In 2005 remarks he said he "expected it to be used constructively while recognizing that in the wrong hands it might be abused," and he separately argued that impact-factor-style metrics are an inappropriate and misleading measure of individual research, especially if used for tenure and promotion. The metric was designed to describe the average citation rate of a journal, not to rank a person.

This makes Garfield an early, self-implicating voice in the critique that scientific institutions later formalized: his warning anticipates by decades the first general recommendation of claim-dora-2013-declaration-rejects-impact-factor-for-research-assessment, which tells institutions not to use journal metrics to assess an individual scientist's contributions. It also frames the two documented gaming failures the vault tracks — editor-side manipulation in claim-wilhite-fong-2012-coercive-self-citation-common and the outright purchase of a citation credential in claim-saudi-universities-bought-clarivate-highly-cited-researcher-status — as realizations of a misuse the inventor had already named. The recurring shape is Goodhart's Law: a measure built to describe scholarly influence becomes an evaluative target and stops measuring what it once did.