School of Communication, Information and Library Studies
Return to SCILS home page

tefko@scils.rutgers.edu
Home Biographical sketch Curriculum vitae Courses D-Lib Edu Selected articles Inf. Processing & Management Conferences Favorites

Biographical sketch

Education & positions: Studied electrical engineering at the University of Zagreb, Croatia and completed his master (1962) and Ph.D. (1970) studies in information science at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. Taught and conducted research at Case till 1985, when moved to Rutgers. Promoted to Professor II (highest academic rank at Rutgers Univ.) in 1991. Associate Dean from 2003 to 2006.

Research: Over the years he conducted research and published widely on: test and evaluation of information retrieval systems; notion of relevance in information science; human aspects in human-computer interaction in information retrieval; user and use studies in information science and librarianship; studies of user-derived value of information and library services; evaluation of digital libraries; and analysis of Web queries as submitted to search engines. As principal investigator or co-principal he has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health, Department of Education, Council for Library Resources, the Rockefeller Foundation, UNESCO, and several other national and international organizations. Results are widely reported, distributed, and cited.

International: Active internationally, particularly in relation to information problems in developing countries. For over a decade he was involved with the Rockefeller Foundation in design, deployment, and evaluation of compact high-quality, low-cost medical information systems in developing countries. He was a visiting professor at four universities abroad. He also worked and consulted with a number of international organizations on development and evaluation of information systems and libraries. He has given seminars, lectures and courses, or consulted, and presented papers at international meetings in 34 countries, and was an invited keynote speaker at over a dozen international conferences. Co-chair of the annual conference and course Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) held in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Professional recognition: He is active in a number of professional associations. He was the president of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) in 1991. He received the Gerard Salton Award for Excellence in Research, by the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, Association for Computing Machinery (SIGIR/ACM) in 1997; the ASIS Award of Merit (highest award given by the Society) in 1995; the 1989 Best Paper Award in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science; the ASIS Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 1985; and the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research in 1991. In 1994 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb, Croatia; he was granted a second Fulbright scholarship for 1999. As of Sept. 2005 he has received 1042 citations in Social Sciences Citation Index, and Science Citation Index, excluding self citations. In a histogram of citations from papers in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST & predecessor names), done by Eugene Garfield from the Web of Science for years 1956-2004 and involving 3725 authors, he ranked first in citations to his work both in articles in the Journal (Total Local Citation Score), as well in articles globally from that Journal (Total Global Citation Score).

Editorial boards: He was and is a member of a number of editorial boards. He was Editor-in Chief from 1985 to 2008 of Information Processing & Management, an international journal published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Regular reviewer for a number of journals and granting agencies.


Tefko Saracevic tefko@scils.rutgers.edu
Last revised 20 Jan. 2008
| Back to Home Page |