Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Web of Science Citations Index

I had a researcher come to the desk on Saturday asking about the accuracy of the indexes which record the number of articles an author has written. He was thinking about himself, of course. He has 14 publications that show up when you do an author search on PubMed (and apparently this is accurate). However, when we went into Web of Science and did an author search, only 12 of them showed up. He was curious about how articles are indexed and why only 12 show up.

I didn’t have any answer and am wondering if anyone else does?

He’s going to come back next Saturday to discuss it again and we’ll look to see which 2 articles aren’t being indexed.

2 Comments:

Blogger Dean Giustini said...

Google scholar indexes, by my last guess, about .5 billion documents. It also provides citation counts, free of charge to web searchers. The Web of Science and Scopus ($$$) provide citation counts that are more accurate among a smaller subset of journals, monographs and grey literature.

In an era of increasing open access, who is more likely to provide accurate citation counts? Dean

8:47 p.m.  
Blogger InfoLit Librarian said...

Interesting, Dean.

Just for fun if he comes in on Saturday I’ll suggest we try Google Scholar, too, so we can see how they compare.

11:01 a.m.  

Post a Comment

<< Home