SLIS Events News

CITATION ANALYSIS OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE FACULTY PUBLICATIONS: ISI DATABASES AND BEYOND

Nov. 11, 2005
12:00pm - 1:15pm
Rm. 001, SLIS
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/research/brown_bag.html

Lokman I. Meho and Kiduk Yang

When evaluated for hiring, tenure, or promotion, faculty members are judged in part by the impact and quality of their scholarly publications. While all academic institutions rely on the subjective opinions of peers and on assessments of publications to evaluate an author's work, many promotion, tenure, and hiring committees additionally rely on citation analysis, especially because it provides a more objective indication of impact and, in many cases, quality and importance. As a result, faculty members try to identify as many citations to their published works as possible to provide an assessment of the overall impact and importance of their publications on the scholarly and professional communities. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index have for over 30 years been used as a starting point, and most often as the only sources, for locating citations. ISI databases, however, have several limitations that may leave gaps in the coverage of citations to an author's work. Using complete publication lists of the full-time faculty members at SLIS, this project identifies alternative and/or additional sources for locating citations to published works. The sources to be examined in this project include, among others full-text commercial databases and Internet sources. In exploring alternative and/or additional sources to ISI citation databases, we answer such questions as: What sources and searching methods can and should one use to locate citations not covered by ISI? What differences do these sources make to citation counts and citation ranking for individual authors? Do these sources represent alternatives to ISI databases or do they complement them? How do citations in these sources compare to those identified through ISI databases in terms of, for example, subject coverage, language, country of origin, and publication year?

To answer these questions, we developed CiteSearch, a federated citation search system, which enables users to easily obtain a comprehensive picture of an author's publication impact, or that of a specific work, by automating the complex and time-consuming process of citation identification and analysis from multiple sources. For this Friday's presentation, we will only focus on a comparison between Google Scholar and ISI citation databases.

Posted Nov. 7, 2005