Accountability of citation databases
From a Correspondence by Brian Haynes in Nature 446, 725; 2007.
ISI has recently delisted a number of publications from the Web of Science without informing the affected publishers or editors, or publishing a full list of the excisions. The motivation seems to have been to focus the Web of Science on journals and to move conference proceedings to another, little-known product, ISI Proceedings — notwithstanding the fact that many journals have special issues containing conference proceedings.
Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, an important archive in the multidisciplinary field of combustion dating back to 1928, is one of the affected publications. Because its peer-reviewed papers are presented at the biennial International Symposium on Combustion, they will no longer be listed in the Web of Science. According to ISI, the decision to exclude this publication "was not based on an evaluation of its importance to the community of scholars it serves".
This experience adds a new dimension to problems with excessive reliance on citation analyses. The Web of Science database itself is subject to unaccountable adjustments without scientific justification or regard to scientific importance.
Brian Haynes
The Combustion Institute, Pittsburgh, USA
Comments
I agree and sympathize with Brian Haynes' letter (Nature 446/12, p. 725) concerning reliance on bibliometrics. This has been an ongoing controversy for a number of years. Undeniably, papers in high impact journals listed in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) do attract more publicity, more citations and more attention. Lower impact journals may also have interesting papers that trigger further important work, yet they are not recognized as readily. And as a colleague of mine, an editor for one of the high impact journals, once said, "A good journal also has bad papers, and vice versa." More of a problem with bibliometrics is its misuse. It is known that some researchers have become so obsessed with publishing in high impact journals that they have fabricated their results. Some administrators, finding it impossible to know every field, have judged their colleagues' futures merely on ISI figures, circumventing the comprehensive international peer review by senior colleagues that was the standard in previous days. Consequently, good scientists working alone in small fields or in remote areas have gone down the drain.
Bibliometrics has somehow strangled and limited the spirit of freedom of research. ISI does have its contributions, helping people scan through the ever-increasing number of research papers available, yet we must find ways to use bibliometrics more wisely. Perhaps impact factors should not be over emphasized and perhaps the half-life of papers in a journal needs to be taken as an index. There is no single solution for this problem, but we must improve this system now, for the future of science.
D. T. Yew
Department of Anatomy
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Posted by: David T. YEW | April 30, 2007 03:15 AM