Gale (publisher)
American publisher (1954-)
Gale is a global provider of research and digital learning resources. The company is based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, United States, west of Detroit. It has been a division of Cengage since 2007.
The company, formerly known as Gale Research and the Gale Group, is active in research and educational publishing for public, academic, and school libraries, and for businesses. The company is known for its full-text magazine and newspaper databases, Gale OneFile (formerly known as Infotrac), and other online databases subscribed by libraries, as well as multi-volume reference works, especially in the areas of religion, history, and social science.
Founded in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954 by Frederick Gale Ruffner Jr., the company was acquired by the International Thomson Organization (later the Thomson Corporation) in 1985 before its 2007 sale to Cengage.
History
In 1998, Gale Research merged with Information Access Company and Primary Source Media, two companies also owned by Thomson, to form the Gale Group. Thomson has acquired Information Access Company (publisher of InfoTrac) in 1995 and Primary Source Media (formerly named Research Publications) in 1979.
In 1999, Thomson Gale acquired Macmillan Library Reference (including Scribner's Reference, Thorndike Press, Schirmer, Twayne Publishers, and G. K. Hall) from Pearson (which had acquired it from Simon & Schuster in 1998; Macmillan USA was purchased by Simon & Schuster in 1994). In 2000 it acquired the Munich-based K. G. Saur Verlag, but then sold it to Walter de Gruyter in 2006.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Gale (publisher)” as american publisher (1954-). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american publisher (1954-). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2077283. VIAF identifies the subject as 150761751. The Library of Congress control number is n80070576. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 1954, 1985 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gale (publisher)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.