Subject: History of citation indexing
Friends:
In the past five years or so, more and more doctoral students in library
science have opted to work in bibliometrics. Citation indexing forms an
important part of bibliometrics. Here is a brief historical account on th=
e
genesis of citation indexing.
Subbiah Arunachalam
History of Citation Indexing
The concept behind citation indexing is fundamentally simple. By
recognizing that the value of information is determined by those who
use it, what better way to measure the quality of the work than by
measuring the impact it makes on the community at large. The widest
possible population within the scholarly community (i.e. anyone who
uses or cites the source material) determines the influence or impact
of the idea and its originator on our body of knowledge. Because of
its simplicity, one tends to forget that citation indexing is actually=
a fairly recent form of information management and retrieval.
There were three factors that led to the development of citation
indexing back in the 1950=92s. With the huge influx of government
dollars into research and development following World War II, the
research community naturally began to publicly document its findings
through the accepted channel of published scientific journal
literature. The subsequent burgeoning of the literature created a need=
for a method of indexing and retrieval that would be more cost
effective and efficient than the then-current model of human indexing
of materials for subject specific indices. While the subtle judgements=
made by subject specialists were valuable in giving depth to a subject=
index, manual indexing was both a more time consuming process and
labor intensive. Its costs increased in proportion to the growth of
material to be indexed. So the need for a better way of managing
information was the first factor.
The second factor was the growing dissatisfaction with the capacity of=
subject indexing to meet the needs of the active researcher. At this
point in time, a subject index could have excessive lag times in
adding materials to the indexes of the time; months could pass before
researchers in one field would learn of published findings in some
other field that had relevance to their own study. Furthermore, there
were limitations to the subject indexing in terms of retrieval.
Terminology appropriate to one specific discipline would not
necessarily have meaning to researchers in another, perhaps
overlapping, discipline. At the same time, scientists were recognizing=
that they had to be aware of, if not completely familiar with, work in=
a number of different subject disciplines in order to be confident
that they had properly grounded the research through an appropriate
review of the literature.
Along with this need was the hope that automation might hold the
answers, the third and final factor in the development of citation
indexing. Computerization in the 1950's was far removed from the
desktop environment of today, but there was tremendous excitement over=
potential benefits to be derived from the application of machines to
the generation and compilation of data. The U.S. government hoped that=
automation could mitigate or even eliminate completely the
difficulties of manual indexing. A number of projects were launched by=
the United States with the intention of investigating these
possibilities.
Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder and now Chairman Emeritus of ISI, was
deeply involved in the research relating to machine generated indexes
in the mid-1950's and early 1960's. One of his earliest points of
involvement was a project sponsored by the Armed Forces Medical
Library (predecessor to our current National Library of Medicine). The=
Welch Medical Library Indexing project, as it was called, was to
investigate the role of automation in the organization and retrieval
of medical literature. The hope was that the problems associated with
subjective human judgement in selection of descriptors and indexing
terms could be eliminated. By removing the human element, one might
thereby increase the speed with which information was incorporated in
to the indexes. It might also increase the cost-effectiveness of the
indexes. Garfield grasped early on that review articles in the journal=
literature were heavily reliant on the bibliographic citations that
referred the reader to the original published source for the notable
idea or concept. By capturing those citations, Garfield believed, the
researcher could immediately get a view of the approach taken by
another scientist to support an idea or methodology based on the
sources that the published writer had consulted and cited as pertinent=
in the bibliography. As retrieval terms, citations could function as
well as keywords and descriptors that were thoughtfully assigned by a
professional indexer.
In the early 1960's, Eugene Garfield and Associates developed two
pilot projects that would test the viability and efficiency of
citation indexing. The first project involved the creation of a
database that would index the citations of 5,000 chemical patents held=
by two private pharmaceutical companies. The referenced citations in
this instance were to prior patents, the documentation sources that
the government patent examiners were using to support a decision to
grant or deny a patent. The connections that the patent citation index=
made were then analyzed with two comparable classification and
indexing systems that were currently being used by the participants.
Based on this investigation and analysis, the project sponsors
determined that citation indexing permitted the retrieval of relevant
literature across arbitrary classifications in a way that subject-
oriented indexing could not.
A second pilot project in 1962 involved Garfield=92s recently
incorporated enterprise, the Institute for Scientific Information,
with the United States National Institutes of Health in building an
index to the published literature on genetics. This project was far
more complex in nature than the patents index. Three databases were
built to cover the literature over 1 year, 5 years and 14 years with a=
varying number of source publications indexed in each. While this
project was to test the feasibility and utility of a narrow,
discipline-oriented citation index, at completion, it was concluded
that the database with the most broadly based set of source
publications formed the most comprehensive and useful guide to the
published literature in the field of genetics. The database for the
single-year term had drawn not just on journals that were primarily
devoted to the field of genetics research but had drawn as well from a=
large pool of journals that published genetics papers on a more
peripheral or occasional basis. Additionally, while the automated
system required a certain level of effort in standardizing the entries=
from a wide variety of published materials, the project demonstrated
the cost-effectiveness of citation indexing as opposed to the expense
of traditional subject indexing processes.
While, at the time of the project=92s completion, the government
sponsors chose not to subsidize the development of a national citation=
database, Eugene Garfield was encouraged to move ahead with the
private publication of his multidisciplinary citation index as the
first edition of the Science Citation Index=AE (SCI=AE). Available for=
purchase since 1963, the SCI then and now represents the most
comprehensive citation index to the scientific journal literature.
Today, the Web-based version of that index covers 5,200 journals
across more than 150 scientific disciplines.
Garfield=92s achievement lay in establishing the utility and objectivi=
ty
of a citation index in pulling up related papers in published
literature that at first glance might not have seemed pertinent to the=
researcher=92s inquiry. Today, it is considered to be one of the most
reliable of resources in tracing the development of an idea across the=
multitude of disciplines that are part of our body of scientific
knowledge.
--PART-BOUNDARY=.19801191105.ZM1093.iitm.ernet.in
Content-Type: text/plain ; charset=us-ascii ; charset=us-ascii
Friends:
In the past five years or so, more and more doctoral students in library
science have opted to work in bibliometrics. Citation indexing forms an
important part of bibliometrics. Here is a brief historical account on the
genesis of citation indexing.
Subbiah Arunachalam
--PART-BOUNDARY=.19801191105.ZM1093.iitm.ernet.in
X-Zm-Content-Name: cite
Content-Description: Transferred from mail from ("Prof. Arunachalam"): Text
Content-Type: text/plain ; name="cite" ; charset=iso-8859-1 ; name=cite ; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Zm-Decoding-Hint: mimencode -q -u
[ The ISI Essays ][ ISI ]
----------------------------------------------------------------------=
-
History of Citation Indexing
The concept behind citation indexing is fundamentally simple. By
recognizing that the value of information is determined by those who
use it, what better way to measure the quality of the work than by
measuring the impact it makes on the community at large. The widest
possible population within the scholarly community (i.e. anyone who
uses or cites the source material) determines the influence or impact
of the idea and its originator on our body of knowledge. Because of
its simplicity, one tends to forget that citation indexing is actually=
a fairly recent form of information management and retrieval.
There were three factors that led to the development of citation
indexing back in the 1950=92s. With the huge influx of government
dollars into research and development following World War II, the
research community naturally began to publicly document its findings
through the accepted channel of published scientific journal
literature. The subsequent burgeoning of the literature created a need=
for a method of indexing and retrieval that would be more cost
effective and efficient than the then-current model of human indexing
of materials for subject specific indices. While the subtle judgements=
made by subject specialists were valuable in giving depth to a subject=
index, manual indexing was both a more time consuming process and
labor intensive. Its costs increased in proportion to the growth of
material to be indexed. So the need for a better way of managing
information was the first factor.
The second factor was the growing dissatisfaction with the capacity of=
subject indexing to meet the needs of the active researcher. At this
point in time, a subject index could have excessive lag times in
adding materials to the indexes of the time; months could pass before
researchers in one field would learn of published findings in some
other field that had relevance to their own study. Furthermore, there
were limitations to the subject indexing in terms of retrieval.
Terminology appropriate to one specific discipline would not
necessarily have meaning to researchers in another, perhaps
overlapping, discipline. At the same time, scientists were recognizing=
that they had to be aware of, if not completely familiar with, work in=
a number of different subject disciplines in order to be confident
that they had properly grounded the research through an appropriate
review of the literature.
Along with this need was the hope that automation might hold the
answers, the third and final factor in the development of citation
indexing. Computerization in the 1950's was far removed from the
desktop environment of today, but there was tremendous excitement over=
potential benefits to be derived from the application of machines to
the generation and compilation of data. The U.S. government hoped that=
automation could mitigate or even eliminate completely the
difficulties of manual indexing. A number of projects were launched by=
the United States with the intention of investigating these
possibilities.
Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder and now Chairman Emeritus of ISI, was
deeply involved in the research relating to machine generated indexes
in the mid-1950's and early 1960's. One of his earliest points of
involvement was a project sponsored by the Armed Forces Medical
Library (predecessor to our current National Library of Medicine). The=
Welch Medical Library Indexing project, as it was called, was to
investigate the role of automation in the organization and retrieval
of medical literature. The hope was that the problems associated with
subjective human judgement in selection of descriptors and indexing
terms could be eliminated. By removing the human element, one might
thereby increase the speed with which information was incorporated in
to the indexes. It might also increase the cost-effectiveness of the
indexes. Garfield grasped early on that review articles in the journal=
literature were heavily reliant on the bibliographic citations that
referred the reader to the original published source for the notable
idea or concept. By capturing those citations, Garfield believed, the
researcher could immediately get a view of the approach taken by
another scientist to support an idea or methodology based on the
sources that the published writer had consulted and cited as pertinent=
in the bibliography. As retrieval terms, citations could function as
well as keywords and descriptors that were thoughtfully assigned by a
professional indexer.
In the early 1960's, Eugene Garfield and Associates developed two
pilot projects that would test the viability and efficiency of
citation indexing. The first project involved the creation of a
database that would index the citations of 5,000 chemical patents held=
by two private pharmaceutical companies. The referenced citations in
this instance were to prior patents, the documentation sources that
the government patent examiners were using to support a decision to
grant or deny a patent. The connections that the patent citation index=
made were then analyzed with two comparable classification and
indexing systems that were currently being used by the participants.
Based on this investigation and analysis, the project sponsors
determined that citation indexing permitted the retrieval of relevant
literature across arbitrary classifications in a way that subject-
oriented indexing could not.
A second pilot project in 1962 involved Garfield=92s recently
incorporated enterprise, the Institute for Scientific Information,
with the United States National Institutes of Health in building an
index to the published literature on genetics. This project was far
more complex in nature than the patents index. Three databases were
built to cover the literature over 1 year, 5 years and 14 years with a=
varying number of source publications indexed in each. While this
project was to test the feasibility and utility of a narrow,
discipline-oriented citation index, at completion, it was concluded
that the database with the most broadly based set of source
publications formed the most comprehensive and useful guide to the
published literature in the field of genetics. The database for the
single-year term had drawn not just on journals that were primarily
devoted to the field of genetics research but had drawn as well from a=
large pool of journals that published genetics papers on a more
peripheral or occasional basis. Additionally, while the automated
system required a certain level of effort in standardizing the entries=
from a wide variety of published materials, the project demonstrated
the cost-effectiveness of citation indexing as opposed to the expense
of traditional subject indexing processes.
While, at the time of the project=92s completion, the government
sponsors chose not to subsidize the development of a national citation=
database, Eugene Garfield was encouraged to move ahead with the
private publication of his multidisciplinary citation index as the
first edition of the Science Citation Index=AE (SCI=AE). Available for=
purchase since 1963, the SCI then and now represents the most
comprehensive citation index to the scientific journal literature.
Today, the Web-based version of that index covers 5,200 journals
across more than 150 scientific disciplines.
Garfield=92s achievement lay in establishing the utility and objectivi=
ty
of a citation index in pulling up related papers in published
literature that at first glance might not have seemed pertinent to the=
researcher=92s inquiry. Today, it is considered to be one of the most
reliable of resources in tracing the development of an idea across the=
multitude of disciplines that are part of our body of scientific
knowledge.
----------------------------------------------------------------------=
-
ISI Home Page | What's Hot | Citation Databases |
How to Reach Us
----------------------------------------------------------------------=
-
This page validated January 9, 1998 at 16:13:41.
For more information, please contact webmaster@isinet.com. (Please be
sure to include your complete address and phone number when writing to=
the Webmaster, as it will aid in our ability to respond to you.)
Copyright =A91995, 1998 Institute for Scientific Information=AE
--PART-BOUNDARY=.19801191105.ZM1093.iitm.ernet.in--