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CITATION INDEX

A citation index is an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which documents cite which other documents.

The first citation indices were probably legal citators such as Shepard's Citations. However, the most widely-known and used citation indexes in the world were created by Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Dr. Garfield introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, starting with the Science Citation Index SCI, and later expanding to produce the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index(AHCI).

Now, ISI is a company of Thomson Scientific. It still produces the SCI, SSCI and AHCI in print and compact disc. However, the most used format is on the Web and called Web of Science, part of the ISI Web of Knowledge collection of literature searching resources. A new and lesser known fee-based service is Scopus from Elsevier that combines subject-searching with citation browsing and tracking. Google Scholar is another newcomer and is currently publicly available at no cost. Unlike the hand-compiled index to cited references found in Web of Science, neither Scopus nor Google Scholar can be considered true citation indexes. Because they do not provide a "look up" table of cited references, one cannot type in an author name and locate all of the articles citing that author. This is critical because much of the analytical data found in a papers' references is lost without this capability.

Indeed, there is large body of literature on citation analysis, sometimes called scientometrics, a term invented by Vasily Nalimov, or bibliometrics. The field blossomed with the advent of the Science Citation Index, which now covers over one hundred years of source literature. The leading journals of the field are Scientometrics and the Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology. ASIST also hosts an electronic mailing list called SIGMETRICS at ASIST[1]. It is undergoing a resurgence based on the wide dissemantion of Web of Science throughout the world's universities and publicly available citation tools such as CiteSeer, the Google Scholar, CiteBase and Windows Live Academic.

While the SCI was originally designed for information retrieval purposes and is used daily for that function, it has been increasingly used for bibliometrics and other studies involving research evaluation.

Contents

History

In a classic 1965 paper, Derek J. de Solla Price described the inherent linking characteristic of the SCI as "Networks of Scientific Papers" [2] . The links between citing and cited papers became dynamic when the SCI began to be published online. The Social Sciences Citation Index became of the first databases to be mounted on the Dialog system [3] in 1972. With the advent of the CD-ROM edition, linking became even easier and enabled the use of bibliographic coupling (M. M. Kessler) for finding related records. In 1973 Henry Small published his classic work on Co-Citation analysis which became a self-organizing classification system that led to document clustering experiments and eventually an Atlas of Science later called Research Reviews.

An early offshoot of the SCI in 1965 was the launch of the first commercial system of selective dissemination of information called Automatic Subject Citation Alert. This system continues as of 2005 in electronic form at the ISI Personal Alert. However, other systems like Dialog among others also adopted the idea of SDI by providing weekly updates of literature searches based on using user profiles. In the case of SCI/SSCI profiles contained not only traditional natural language search terms, but also terms for cited references and cited authors. Thus, a user could be alerted to any new works which cited the author, paper or book in question. Using journal names in a similar way, customized contents pages could also be provided.

The inherent topological and graphical nature of the worldwide citation network which is an inherent property of the scientific literature was described by Ralph Garner at Drexel University in 1965.

The use of citation counts to rank journals was a technique used in the early part of the nineteenth century but the measurement of these links to rank authors and papers was pioneered by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information. In a primordial paper of 1965 he and Irving Sher showed the correlation between citation frequency and eminence in demonstrating that Nobel Prize winners published five times the average number of papers while their work was cited 30 to 50 times the average. In a long series of essays on the Nobel and other prizes Garfield reported this phenomenon.

In an early study in 1964 of the use of Citation Analysis in writing the history of DNA, Garfield and Sher demonstrated the potential for generating historiographs, topological maps of the most important steps in the history of scientific topics. This work was later automated by E. Garfield, A. I. Pudovkin of the Institute of Marine Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences and V. S. Istomin of Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, Washington State University and led to the creation of the HistCite [4] software around 2002.

Autonomous citation indexing was introduced in 1998 by Giles, Lawrence and Bollacker and enabled automatic algorithmic extraction and grouping of citations for any digital academic and scientific document. Where previous citation extraction was a manual process, citation measures could now be computed for any scholarly and scientific field and document venue, not just those selected by organizations such as ISI. This led to the creation of new systems for public and automated citation indexing, the first being CiteSeer, soon followed by Cora (recently reborn as Rexa), which focused primarily on the field of computer and information science. These were later followed by large scale academic domain citation systems such as the Google Scholar and more recently Microsoft Academic. Autonomous citation indexing is not yet perfect in citation extraction or citation clustering with an error rate estimated by some at 10%.

Today, there are more measures (such as Jorge Hirsch's [5] H-Index[6] established in 2005 to evaluate an author) and more interactive tools available (such as the Scopus Citation Tracker [7] in 2006) to help assess history and trends through citations.

See also

References

  1. ^ The American Society for Information Science & Technology. The Information Society for the Information Age. Retrieved on 2006-05-21.
  2. ^ Derek J. de Solla Price (July 30, 1965). "NETWORKS OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS". SCIENCE 149 (3683): 510–515. PMID 14325149.
  3. ^ Dialog, A Thompson Business. "Dialog invented online information services". Retrieved on 2006-05-21.
  4. ^ Eugene Garfield, A. I. Pudovkin, V. S. Istomin (2002). Algorithmic Citation-Linked Historiography—Mapping the Literature of Science. Presented the ASIS&T 2002: Information, Connections and Community. 65th Annual Meeting of ASIST in Philadelphia, PA. November 18-21, 2002. Retrieved on 2006-05-21.
  5. ^ Jorge E. Hirsch. Professor of physics Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1980. Retrieved on 2006-05-21.
  6. ^ An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output (PDF). J. E. Hirsch. Retrieved on 2006-05-21.
  7. ^ Scopus Citation Tracker. Reed Elsevier Press Release: "Scopus Empowers Researchers with new Citation Tracker". Retrieved on 2006-05-21.

Bibliography

External links