Institute for Scientific Information

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The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. [1] ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield.

Contents

Services

ISI maintained citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). All of these were available via ISI's Web of Knowledge database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them. The database provides some measure of the academic impact of the papers indexed in it, and may increase their impact by making them more visible and providing them with a quality label. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that appearing in this database can double the number of citations received by a given paper. [2] The company's main product was Current Contents, which gathers the tables of contents for recent academic journals. [1]

The ISI also published the annual Journal Citation Reports which list an impact factor for each of the journals that it tracked. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors continue to play a large but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist's published research record.

A list of over 14,000 journals was maintained by the ISI. The list included some 1,100 arts and humanities journals as well as scientific journals. Listings were based on published selection criteria and is an indicator of journal quality and impact. [3]

ISI published Science Watch, a newsletter which every two months identified one paper published in the previous two years as a "fast breaking paper" in each of 22 broad fields of science, such as Mathematics (including Statistics), Engineering, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.[ citation needed ] The designations were based on the number of citations and the largest increase from one bimonthly update to the next. Articles about the papers often included comments by the authors.

The ISI also published a list of "ISI Highly Cited Researchers", one of the factors included in the Academic Ranking of World Universities published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This continues under Clarivate. [4]

History

Initially, the company was named Documation. [1] In 1992, ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare, [5] and became known as Thomson ISI. It was a part of the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters until 2016, when the IP & Science business was sold, becoming Clarivate Analytics. [6] In February 2018, Clarivate announced it will re-establish ISI as part of its Scientific and Academic Research group. [7] It exists as a group within Clarivate as of November 2018. [4]

ISI Highly Cited

"ISI Highly Cited" is a database of "highly cited researchers"—scientific researchers whose publications are most often cited in academic journals over the past decade, published by the Institute for Scientific Information. Inclusion in this list is taken as a measure of the esteem of these academics and is used, for example, by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. It was founded under ISI and as of 2018 continues under the same name at Clarivate. [4]

The methodology for inclusion is to consider papers in the upper first percentile based on citation counts [8] of all articles indexed in the Scientific Citation Databases and published in a single, fixed year. Papers in the upper first percentile with respect of their year of publication are called highly cited papers. Each paper in the data is assigned to one or more of 21 categories, based on the ISI classification of the journal in which the article was published. The Highly Cited Researchers list is compiled by selecting, in every field, those researchers with the highest number of highly cited papers in a 10-year, rolling time period. The number of highly cited researchers varies from field to field and is determined accordingly to the total number of researchers contributing to the single field.

The categories are as follows:

The publication list and biographical details supplied by the researchers are freely available online, although general access to the ISI citation database is by subscription.

See also

Related Research Articles

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A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1960, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly average number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factor values are often deemed to be more important, or carry more intrinsic prestige in their respective fields, than those with lower values.

Scientometrics is the field of study which concerns itself with measuring and analysing scholarly literature. Scientometrics is a sub-field of bibliometrics. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that over-reliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low quality research.

Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A typical aim would be to identify the most important documents in a collection. A classic example is that of the citations between academic articles and books. For another example, judges of law support their judgements by referring back to judgements made in earlier cases. An additional example is provided by patents which contain prior art, citation of earlier patents relevant to the current claim.

Eugene Garfield

Eugene Eli Garfield was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index (SCI), Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.

<i>Journal of Molecular Biology</i> Academic journal

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Citation impact is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The journal impact factor, the two-year average ratio of citations to articles published, is a measure of the importance of journals. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.

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<i>Evolution and Human Behavior</i> Academic journal

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The Science Citation Index (SCI) is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and is now owned by Clarivate Analytics. The larger version covers more than 9,200 notable and significant journals, across 178 disciplines, from 1900 to the present. These are alternatively described as the world's leading journals of science and technology, because of a rigorous selection process.

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Web of Science Online subscription index of citations

Web of Science is a website that provides subscription-based access to multiple databases that provide comprehensive citation data for many different academic disciplines. It was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and is currently maintained by Clarivate Analytics.

Current Contents is a rapid alerting service database from Clarivate Analytics, formerly the Institute for Scientific Information and Thomson Reuters. It is published online and in several different printed subject sections.

The Materials Science Citation Index is a citation index, established in 1992, by Thomson ISI. Its overall focus is cited reference searching of the notable and significant journal literature in materials science. The database makes accessible the various properties, behaviors, and materials in the materials science discipline. This then encompasses applied physics, ceramics, composite materials, metals and metallurgy, polymer engineering, semiconductors, thin films, biomaterials, dental technology, as well as optics. The database indexes relevant materials science information from over 6,000 scientific journals that are part of the ISI database which is multidisciplinary. Author abstracts are searchable, which links articles sharing one or more bibliographic references. The database also allows a researcher to use an appropriate article as a base to search forward in time to discover more recently published articles that cite it.

Clarivate Citation Laureates formerly Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates is a list of candidates considered likely to win the Nobel Prize in their respective field. The candidates are so named based on the citation impact of their published research. The list of awardees is announced annually prior to the Nobel Prize ceremonies of that year. In October 2016, Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property and Science Business was acquired by Onex and Baring Asia and the newly independent company was named as Clarivate.

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Clarivate American analytics company

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Wouters, Paul (2017-03-01). "Eugene Garfield (1925–2017)". Nature. 543 (7646): 492. Bibcode:2017Natur.543..492W. doi: 10.1038/543492a . ISSN   1476-4687. PMID   28332532.
  2. ↑ Varela, Diego (2013). "The Contribution of ISI Indexing to a Paper's Citations: Results of a Natural Experiment". European Political Science. 12 (2): 245–253. doi:10.1057/eps.2012.29. S2CID   144822423.
  3. ↑ "Master Journal List". Clarivate Analytics. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 "Global Highly Cited Researchers 2018 List Reveals Influential Scientific Researchers and their Institutions". Clarivate. November 27, 2018. Retrieved January 7, 2019.
  5. ↑ "Thomson Corporation acquired ISI". Online . July 1992. Archived from the original on 2013-05-15. Retrieved 2012-02-26.
  6. ↑ "PR Newswire". ipscience.thomsonreuters.com. Archived from the original on 5 December 2016. Retrieved 23 March 2018.
  7. ↑ "Back to the Future: Institute for Scientific Information Re-established Within Clarivate Analytics". 7 February 2018. Retrieved 24 April 2018.
  8. ↑ Welcome to Highly Cited Researchers, retrieved July 6, 2014
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