16 november 2006
Citation reports introduced in Web of Science
Somewhere in October I received a mailing from ISI on the enhancements of Web of Science (WoS) that were going to be introduced on November 5th. I checked it out on the 5th, the sixth the seventh, and eighth to no avail and gave up. Until this morning when Rafael Sidi drew my attention to the enhancements of WoS again. On his blog he posted a picture from an ISI folder, but checking it in reality, it appeared that the citation reports finally had become available on WoS. Subsequently I found that Recherchenblog also had noted the citation reports in WoS.
With their citation reports they have attempted to leap frog over Scopus from Elsevier, but I think their attempt failed. Yes, they have two attractive graphs. And yes, they include the h-index in the report as well, but when you look at the actual data, I can only conclude that they have direclty copied the citation report from Scopus. A real pity that they were not able to improve, or enhance these reports from Scopus.
Okay Elsevier's Scopus is not including an automated H-index calculation at this moment, but that is coming. This week I have seen some of these planned enhancements for Scopus.
What was new on WoS side though, was the possibility to correct for self citations. But when I tested this, I got the impression that the corrections were made only for the individual authors. Not for his or her co-authors, which should be excluded as well.
Another enhancement that WoS has made under pressure of the competition from Scopus is author disambiguation. That have not come very far though. So far they disambiguated only their highly cited authors. They have not come around to the the Park or Lee's from Korea.
So WoS still has its niche as far as the history of citation data is concerned, with the current citation report they have caught up with Scopus again in the reporting standards. The author disambiguation should be implemented a lot further will they really catch up.
Technorati tags: wos; Web of Science; Citation reports
With their citation reports they have attempted to leap frog over Scopus from Elsevier, but I think their attempt failed. Yes, they have two attractive graphs. And yes, they include the h-index in the report as well, but when you look at the actual data, I can only conclude that they have direclty copied the citation report from Scopus. A real pity that they were not able to improve, or enhance these reports from Scopus.
Okay Elsevier's Scopus is not including an automated H-index calculation at this moment, but that is coming. This week I have seen some of these planned enhancements for Scopus.
What was new on WoS side though, was the possibility to correct for self citations. But when I tested this, I got the impression that the corrections were made only for the individual authors. Not for his or her co-authors, which should be excluded as well.
Another enhancement that WoS has made under pressure of the competition from Scopus is author disambiguation. That have not come very far though. So far they disambiguated only their highly cited authors. They have not come around to the the Park or Lee's from Korea.
So WoS still has its niche as far as the history of citation data is concerned, with the current citation report they have caught up with Scopus again in the reporting standards. The author disambiguation should be implemented a lot further will they really catch up.
Technorati tags: wos; Web of Science; Citation reports
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