4th Regional Conference on EMR Health Sciences Virtual Library
Citation Analysis Tools Web of Science & Scopus
Prepared by
Aida FARHA Reference Librarian af02@aub.edu.lb & Hilda NASSAR Director, Medical Librarian nassarh@aub.edu.lb
Saab Medical Library American University of Beirut
Citation Analysis Tools
Citation analysis tools are multidisciplinary resources, covering a wide range of scientific/technical publications
Provide a compilation of all cited references from publications during a particular year -„Web of Science‟ -„Scopus‟
Citation Analysis Tools
(Cont’d)
In addition to usual searching of bibliographic databases, they offer „cited reference‟ search where one can find citations that cite a given author or a specific article Empower users with unique services not available in other resources References & Citations allow users to navigate forward and backward through the literature through linking of ideas
In Addition,
Powerful tools to evaluate quality of research published in STM journals: Academic promotion committees assess productivity of faculty and the scientific importance of their work. Funding organizations use them for deciding whether to fund a research or not. Librarians use them to select collection Interest in citation analysis has grown and with it there has been a matching growth in the criticism of using it as the only criteria for evaluation.
Old Sayings…
‘Tell me who you cite and I tell you what your article is about’ 'Whenever dead authors are cited on earth, an angel sings a song for them in heaven' German saying
“Association-of-Ideas” Index
Eugene Garfield first realized that: - A document can be the foundation for ‘architecture’ of an idea. By tracing path of its citations, researchers can navigate through time to discover how an idea evolved into an established scientific concept. - Cited reference searching ‘discovers hidden’ relationships between articles missed by traditional subject searching
Institute for Scientific Information
First citation analysis tool founded (early 1960s) by Dr. Eugene Garfield Realized that there is a subject relation between an article and the references cited by the author of that article ISI now produces: Web of Science, ISIHighlyCited.com, Journal Citation Reports etc…
ISIHighlyCited.com
(http://isihighlycited.com)
Identifies most highly cited researchers of our time, from life sciences, medicine, engineering and social sciences… Biography & bibliography of those who contributed to the progress of science through their insight and accomplishments Free, can search or browse by researcher, institution, subject category or country
Web of Science (WoS)
Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts / Humanities Citation Index Multidisciplinary database, covers a broad scope of scientific fields indexing about 8500 of most „prestigious‟ research journals, (1945-) In 2005, “Century of Science” back to 1900 and started citation analysis to open access resources [now indexes 200 OA]
WoS as an Evaluation Tool
How frequently a paper has been cited is used to assess its „impact‟, but conclusions should be drawn carefully:
Citations work best for first authors for WoS Different authors may share same family name & initials Self citations - could be removed Article might be ignored by scientific community, perhaps author is „ahead of his time‟ Journals not indexed by WoS would be missed. WoS covers ~ 44% of print citations Citations to a particular article might be criticizing it
Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
Used as an evaluation tool for journals: „Science‟ & „Social Sciences‟ (1975-) Provides indicators such as: Impact Factor (IF) Total Cites (number of times a journal has been cited by all journals included in WoS within current year) Immediacy Index: a measure of how quickly the „average article‟ in a journal is cited “hottest” journals having highest Immediacy Index, etc...
Impact Factor (IF)
Most widely used indicator Number of citations to all articles published in a specific journal in the two previous years, divided by the number of “citable” documents published in that journal in those two years. IF is a measure of the frequency with which the „average article‟ in a journal has been cited in a particular year.
Impact Factor (IF)
(cont‟d)
Helps in evaluating a journal's relative importance, especially when compared to other journals in same field Developed to select journals for inclusion in ISI Current Contents Now used by academic librarians to guide them in selecting their journals collection
IF, a good evaluation tool ???
Changes in journal size affect IF Inaccuracy in database (misprinting) leads to inaccuracies in citation analysis Certain fields have more citations as in rapidly developing fields such as immunology or molecular biology. These would have a higher IF than already established fields Incorrect to consider a journal IF (average „citedness of the journal‟s articles) to correspond to all articles published in that journal. This is because 20% of articles in a journal account for 80% of citations, and a large number of articles are never cited.
Manipulating Impact Factor
One interesting case was reported in literature where “Leukemia” was accused of manipulating IF by requesting from authors submitting manuscript to this journal to cite as many references from articles published in “Leukemia”. This would then have a push-up effect on IF of that journal
Web Impact Factor (WIF)
An equivalent product to IF of journals is Web Impact Factor, proposed in 1998 as the IF for Internet Websites.
WIF is defined as the ratio of links made to a site compared to the number of information units (number of pages) at the Web site
Scopus™
Comprehensive citation analysis tool from Elsevier Developed – 2 years ago - by Scopus team working with key international institutes (AUB) to ensure the product meets end-users' and libraries' needs. Indexes ~14,000 peer-reviewed journals covering broad field of science: health, life sciences, engineering, chemistry, social sciences, etc… Draws records from major databases: Medline, Embase… In addition to bibliographic searching it does citation analysis and simultaneous searching of the science websites using Scirus Indexes >400 Open Access resources
Scopus™
(cont‟d)
Has a very user-friendly interface while searching or browsing and offers full-text linkage. Search for a broad topic then easily and neatly limit search by a number of options: author, journal, year… Provides many additional useful options such as citation alerts, address of author, list of references of the indexed articles with all the links, etc…
[Live Demo]
Citebase
(http://citebase.eprints.org)
New citation analysis tool for the free online research literature, now at experimental stage. It is the search engine produced by Open Citation Project (OpCit) which is a citation analysis tool for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). When digital libraries store institutional articles in a form that complies with an OAI metadata format, then services like Citebase can collect this data and index it to make it available to all users. Includes ALL BMC journals
CiteSeer
(http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu)
CiteSeer is the Scientific Literature Digital Library that aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of scientific literature. It indexes research Web articles in PDF and provides an automatic citation analysis tool for these articles. Uses full-text indexing, allowing Boolean operators and phrase searching.
Impact of Free Web Articles
Articles freely available on Internet would have a higher probability to be cited by others, resulting in faster scientific progress. Estimated one million research Web articles freely available; the mean number of citations to these articles was about 2.6 times greater than offline articles
More Citation Analysis Tools
Other less comprehensive citation analysis tools: - Google Scolar (http://scholar.google.com) - PubMed: ‘Cited in PMC’ - ScienceDirect: Elsevier - Chemical Abstracts: SciFinder Scholar - some journals homepage like BMJ… Most of these also allow the creation of citation alerts…
Conclusion
Empower users with unique services not available through other resources Two developed tools, other tools emerged but are in a developing stage and non has a complete coverage Powerful tools used in academic institutions to evaluate authors, journals or institutions; have limitations and should be used knowledgeably as a supplement rather than a replacement to traditional tools of quality measurement
REFERENCES
1. Fitzpatrick, R.B. ISI‟s Journal Citation Reports on the Web. Med Ref Serv Q 22(4):45-56, 2003. 2. Gisvold, S.E. Citation analysis and journal impact factors – is the tail wagging the dog? Acta Anaesthesiol Scand 43:971-973, 1999. 3. Ingwersen, P. The calculation of Web Impact Factors. J Document 54(2):236-243, 1998. 4. Lawrence, S. Free online availability substantially increases a paper‟s impact. Nature 411(6837):521, 2001. 5. Nisonger, T.E. Citation autobiography: an investigation of ISI database coverage in determining author citedness. Coll Res Libr 65(2):152-163, 2004. 6. Sims, J.L. and McGhee, C.N.J. Citation analysis and journal impact factors in ophthalmology and vision science journals. Clin Exp Ophthalmol 31:14-22, 2003. 7. Smith, R. Journal accused of manipulating Impact Factor [news]. BMJ 314:461, 1997.