Brian D. Cameron

A reference and systems librarian at what is now Toronto Metropolitan University Library (then Ryerson University), and author of the 2005 paper "Trends in the Usage of ISI Bibliometric Data: Uses, Abuses, and Implications" (portal: Libraries and the Academy 5(1), Johns Hopkins University Press). Matters to this vault as the actual, confirmed source of a sentence long treated as Eugene Garfield's own words — "an inappropriate and misleading measure of individual research, especially if used for tenure and promotion" — which turned out to be Cameron's own footnoted paraphrase of Garfield's 1998 letter, not a Garfield quotation. He also independently cites Per O. Seglen's 1992 skewness findings, corroborating a mechanism this vault already had from a different secondary source.

References

• claim-cameron-2005-not-garfield-authored-tenure-and-promotion-sentence
• claim-cameron-2005-hargens-schuman-1990-citation-data-hiring-tenure-scope

Updates

• 2026-08-10: A direct read of Cameron's endnotes confirms his footnotes 54 and 55 split the "35%/60% departments" and "5,000 departments by 1998" figures between two different primaries — footnote 54 to Hargens & Schuman (1990), footnote 55 to Garfield's own 1998 letter — and that footnote 54 names the co-author "Howard Schuman," correcting a "Herman Schuman" transcription error carried in the vault since 2026-08-09. (claim-cameron-2005-hargens-schuman-1990-citation-data-hiring-tenure-scope)