From gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU Wed Dec 1 17:52:24 1999 From: gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU (Gretchen Whitney) Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 17:52:24 -0500 Subject: ABS&Comment: da Gama AA, Evaluation of graduate programs in chemistry in Brazil Message-ID: E-mail addresses: A.A. daGama : arnobio at npd.ufpe.br Faruk Jose Nome: faruk at reitoria.ufsc.br Jose Caetano Machado: caetano at dedalus.lcc.ufmg.br TITLE: Evaluation of graduate programs in chemistry in Brazil. AUTHOR da Gama AA, Nome FJ, Machado JC JOURNAL QUIMICA NOVA 22: (3) 443-447 MAY-JUN 1999 Document type: Article Language: Portuguese Cited References: 3 Times Cited: 0 Abstract: A broad picture of the graduate programs in chemistry in Brazil is analyzed from the data collected during the period 1996/1997 for evaluation by GAPES. The results are compared with those from previous evaluations, indicating significant quantitative and qualitative progresses. Author Keywords: graduate programs in chemistry, graduate programs in Brazil, chemistry in Brazil Addresses: da Gama AAS, UFPE, Dept Quim Fundamental, BR-50670901 Recife, PE, Brazil. UFPE, Dept Quim Fundamental, BR-50670901 Recife, PE, Brazil. UFSC, Dept Quim, BR-80040900 Florianopolis, SC, Brazil. UFMG, Dept Quim, BR-31270901 Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil. Publisher: SOC BRASILEIRA QUIMICA, SAO PAULO IDS Number: 194FE ISSN: 0100-4042 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- English summary provided by the author - Jose Caetano Machado: COMMENT: The data in this paper covers many facets in the evaluation of graduate programs in Chemistry in Brazil. However, those data concerned with research effectiveness will be of special interest to SIG-Metrics readers. A pie chart shows the "Distribution of published articles according to journal impact factors." Journals are assigned to categories A to E where (A) journals are those with an impact of 1 or higher (44%). (B) journals with impact greater than or equal to 0.5 (23%) and (C) journals with impact lower than 0.5 (23%). (D) and (E) journals account for 10% and almost no impact whatsoever (2% and 8% respectively). 2,269 papers (82.4%) were published, in international journals and 17.6% in national journals. Of the latter 161 papers, 65 (40%) were published in Quimica Nova. The Graph clearly shows that 67% of the scientific production of graduate chemistry in Brazil is concentrated in level A and B journals. Table1. Evolution of the indexes normally used for the analysis of Graduation Courses/Programs Periods 83/84 85/86 87/89 90/91 92/93 94/95 96/97 Permanent Faculty members 376 422 565 624 637 704 Total number of faculty members 515 564 705 902 910 (938) 842 National Publications 119 152 368 226 276 299 399 International Publications 358 427 830 610 1090 1024 1870 Total Number of Publications 477 579 1198 836 1366 1323 2269 Publications / faculty member 0.63 0.69 1.06 0.67 1.07 0.94 / year (permanent) Publications/faculty member/year (total) 0.46 0.51 0.85 0.46 0.75 (0.71) 1.35 Master's Students 599 813 1115 1218 1278 1017 Doctorate Students 276 336 545 800 1069 1042 Total number of Students 875 1149 1660 2018 2347 2059 2981 Graduated Masters 226 212 411 476 457 446 664 Graduated Doctors 75 81 109 157 178 279 380 Average Graduation time/masters 48 51 46 46 43 42 38 Average graduation time/doctors 66 65 71 64 59 58 60 Students/faculty member 1.70 2.04 2.35 2.24 2.58 (2.20) 3.54 Note: Data between 1983 and 1995 were obtained from Brocksom and Andrade Quimica Nova 1997, 20,29 excepted the numbers of publications in the 94/95 period, obtained for the data bank of CAPES. The total number of faculty members in the same period was not informed. A reference value was estimated based on the average of previous periods. In the 96/97 period the lack of clear distinction between permanent faculty members and participants may have led to a reduction in the record of the latter. ------------------------------------------------------------- Eugene Garfield, Ph.D. Chairman Emeritus, ISI, 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Publisher, THE SCIENTIST, 3600 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (www.the-scientist.com) Tel: 215-243-2205 // Fax: 215-387-1266 email: garfield at codex.cis.upenn.edu The Scientist: http://www.the-scientist.com Home Page: http://garfield.library.upenn.edu ------------------------------------------------------------- From gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU Wed Dec 1 18:25:05 1999 From: gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU (Gretchen Whitney) Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 18:25:05 -0500 Subject: ART: Ojasoo, Citation bias in medical journals Message-ID: T. OJASOO, J.C. DORE'. Citation bias in medical journals. Scientometrics, 45(1999)81-94. E-mail: t.ojasoo at anaes.fr Background and aim: The impact factor is a scalar measure calculated from the Institute of Scientific Information's (ISI) citation counts which ranks journals according to citation frequency. Despite its attractiveness, it can be misleading. Instead of reducing citation to a numerical indicator, we used several complementary multivariate methods to provide objective pictorial descriptions of the data in order to discover hidden correlations. Methods: We used the citation data for urology and related journals in the JCR microfilms (ISI database for 1993) to calculate citation profiles (i.e. the relative extent to which each journal cites itself and other journals within a set). We analyzed these profiles by three multivariate methods (hierarchical classification, minimum spanning tree, and correspondence factor analysis). Conclusions: (reprinted by kind permission of Scientometrics) Citation counts contain hidden information on citation habits that can be unearthed by appropriate descriptive multivariate methods. Because we are dealing with probabilities, no single algorithm will lead to a definite conclusion but complementary methods can provide graphic overviews, from different angles, that mutually support and refine each others' conclusions. Admittedly, the data in our demonstration refer to a small number of journals and to a single year (1993). Nevertheless, we would not be unduly surprised if many of our conclusions prove to be valid for later years and, possibly, for disciplines other than urology. We shall emphasize five points: (i) The journal with the highest rate of self-citation was J. Urology which is also the journal with the highest impact factor and the American Urological Society journal. (ii) There is a transatlantic rift in citation practice, as reported elsewhere.16 US publications tend to cite each other. European journals, even if they may cite US journals frequently, cite their European neighbours more frequently than US journals do. (iii) In 1993, the citation profile of The Prostate - a journal which ISI listed under "Endocrinology and Metabolism" only - was closer to that of urology journals than was the citation profile of Kidney International, the nephrology journal with the highest impact factor. Urology journals, which overall interfaced little with other disciplines, tended to refer to journals in oncology, general & internal medicine, surgery and nuclear medicine rather than to journals in nephrology. Only since 1995 does ISI include The Prostate in the "Urology & Nephrology" section but it still classifies urology and nephrology journals under a single heading and provides a joint list of impact factors. Impact factors vary widely with discipline and the way in which ISI allocates journals to disciplines is not transparent. In our opinion, for most purposes, impact factors should not be compared if they do not refer to the same fields. The determination and comparison of citation profiles could be a means of classifying journals before listing impact factors. (iv) Comparing citation profiles by factorial analysis can help pinpoint the journals that might interface best between basic and clinical research. (v) The use of correspondence factor analysis to study time-series can highlight the non-linear nature of citation practice and show that citations, as in the case of urology journals, tend to refer to particular epochs. Research does not advance on an even keel and this is reflected in how frequently publications within a certain time-span are cited. Are these conclusions relevant to the future or will easier and faster access to reference data banks and abstracting services dramatically change citation profiles in years to come? Expensive direct online queries from Europe to, for instance, Medline have been replaced by cheaper CD-Roms and now by free access on the Internet (PubMed). Will this bridge the transantlantic rift, in both directions? Probably not, if specialist journals from minority groups, however original the research they publish and wherever their home-base (US, Europe or elsewhere), have difficulty in getting indexed in the largest and most influential databases (Medline, SCI, etc...) and if research, after a period of internationalisa-tion, becomes increasingly balkanized. Multivariate analyses of publication profiles (% output per discipline) of the 48 most prolific nations in 18 scientific disciplines, derived from ISI data, have indicated that, from 1981 to 1992, there was a clear trend for nearly all nations to conform to an average world "anglo-saxon" publication profile defined not only by the US but also by England, in fact by the G7 nations (except Japan).15,17,18 In clinical medicine, will citation bias to US journals not continue to increase if all tools are "made in USA"? Is there not a case for trying to find ways of fostering original research that springs from the diversity of national cultural traditions? How about more single author exploratory papers on finding new hypotheses rather than testing them19; cross-speciality journals; and developing new search tools? References 16. J. Joyce, S. Rabe-Hesketh, S. Wessely, Reviewing the reviews: the example of the chronic fatigue syndrome, Journal of the American Medical Association, 280 (1998) 264-266. 17. J.C. Dor?, T. Ojasoo, Y. Okubo, T. Durand, G. Dudognon, J.F. Miquel, Correspondence factor analysis of the publication patterns of 48 countries over the period 1981-1992. Journal of the American Association for Information Science, 47 (1996) 588-602. 18. T. Ojasoo, The disciplines of national wealth. Nature (Scientific correspon-dence) , 391(1998) 628. 19. T. Ojasoo, The scientific author. Would more single author scientific papers generate new paradigms? http://www.tribunes.com/tribune/art98/ojas4.htm, April 1998. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Gretchen Whitney, PhD tel 423.974.7919 School of Information Sciences fax 423.974.4967 University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA gwhitney at utk.edu http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/ jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> From gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU Fri Dec 3 20:07:55 1999 From: gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU (Gretchen Whitney) Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 20:07:55 -0500 Subject: FR to ENG translator requested Message-ID: Hi all, A conference description / announcement has come to my attention that my rusty French suggests that it would be interesting for this group, but I'm not willing to try to translate it. Anyone willing to translate it for us? It's about 100 lines long. Please respond to me personally at gwhitney at utk.edu. Thanks! <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Gretchen Whitney, PhD tel 423.974.7919 School of Information Sciences fax 423.974.4967 University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA gwhitney at utk.edu http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/ jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> From tabahan at EBSI.UMONTREAL.CA Sat Dec 4 08:20:22 1999 From: tabahan at EBSI.UMONTREAL.CA (Albert Tabah) Date: Sat, 4 Dec 1999 08:20:22 -0500 Subject: FR to ENG translator requested Message-ID: Hello, I'll be happy to help. Given all you are doing for us, this is the least I can do to thank you. Please send the messsage to me at tabahan at ebsi.umontreal.ca and give me a day or so. I'll send it back to your private mail, and you can post it. Best regards, Albert Tabah University of Montreal From gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU Thu Dec 9 17:13:52 1999 From: gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU (Gretchen Whitney) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 17:13:52 -0500 Subject: Professor Belver Griffith (fwd) Message-ID: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Elaine Danelutti 215/895-2483 elaine.danelutti at cis.drexel.edu Dr. Belver C. Griffith A Pioneer in Information Science 1931- 1999 Belver C. Griffith, professor emeritus and research professor at Drexel University's College of Information Science and Technology died at his Philadelphia home Saturday, October 23, 1999 after a prolonged illness. Dr. Griffith taught at Drexel's College of Information Science and Technology from 1969 until he retired in 1991. He was a pioneer in the field of information science and a world-renowned scientometrician studying the patterns in formal and information communication among scientists. He did extensive research on the ways in which the scientific literature ages and performed key studies involving author cocitation. Dr. Griffith was the author of over 200 reports and articles and edited two books during his career. Works that he authored or co-authored have been translated into German, Chinese, Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, and Russian. Several articles on the literature of information science or the quantitative study of science have identified him as being among the most highly cited first authors in these fields. In addition to his record of publication, he received many awards for his research including the 1996 Derek de Solla Price Award for scientometrics; the Drexel University Research Achievement Award in 1980; and the 1982 ASIS "Outstanding Information Teacher Award". He was also elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1987 received the Distinguished Lectureship award from the New Jersey division of the American Society for Information Science. Belver Griffith received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and the M.A. and PhD. in experimental psychology from the University of Connecticut. Before joining Drexel, Dr. Griffith was associate director, and then director of the American Psychological Association Project on Scientific Information Exchange in Psychology. During that time, he was responsible for the technical aspects of planning an information system for psychology, which led eventually to the automation of Psychological Abstracts. While on a postdoctoral fellowship, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and a research associate at E.R. Johnstone Training and Research Center where he did experimental work on cognition, language, and speech. Outside his scientific interests, Dr. Griffith enjoyed sailing on the Chesapeake Bay, art and antiques. His wife, Carolyn Adams and daughters, Caitlin, Wynne, and Leigh survive him. Memorial donations may be made to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, 162 Prince George St., Annapolis, Md. 21401. Family and friends are gathering on January 29, 2000 at the Drexel University Academic Building on 33rd and Arch Streets from 2 pm to 3:30 pm to celebrate the life of Belver Griffith. ### November 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------- Eugene Garfield, Ph.D. Chairman Emeritus, ISI, 3501 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Publisher, THE SCIENTIST, 3600 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (www.the-scientist.com) Tel: 215-243-2205 // Fax: 215-387-1266 email: garfield at codex.cis.upenn.edu The Scientist: http://www.the-scientist.com Home Page: http://garfield.library.upenn.edu ------------------------------------------------------------- From gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU Thu Dec 9 17:48:46 1999 From: gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU (Gretchen Whitney) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 17:48:46 -0500 Subject: MEET: The Citation Culture Message-ID: Translated from the French by: From: Tabah Albert From: Roger Coronini Subject: The Culture of Citation The SERD INRA team at the UPMF (Universite Pierre Mendes France) is organizing a two-part seminar on the 14th of December at the CICG, Room R1, 351 Avenue de la Bibliotheque on the university campus of Saint Martin d'Heres: at 2 p.m. a seminar on the new culture of citation and at 3:30 p.m. a seminar on the transformations induced by the Internet on the research process. These two conferences will be given by Paul Wouters. Thank you for disseminating this information. Paul Wouters is researcher in sociology and scientometrics at the Institute for Information Sciences of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences: NIWI The Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences P.O.Box 95110 1090 HC Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel. 3120 4628654 Fax 3120 6658013 www.niwi.knaw.nl 2 p.m.: THE CITATION CULTURE The increasing need for metrics in the scientific milieu has given rise to new professions. Scientometricians are some of these new experts. They measure science, often for the needs of science policy. This profession was born during the 1960s and has been closely linked to the invention of the Science Citation Index. The development of scientometrics can be better understood if one can combine it with the emerging new subculture: the citation culture. This subculture has unintentionally and in a subtle fashion modified the basic concepts of modern science, such as quality and influence. The citation culture and especially the fact of being cited has evolved during the last twenty years with a number of important consequences for scientists. In addition, it has contributed to the transformation of the essence of science policy despite a lack of apparent success for scientometrics. The objective of this seminar is to explore the significance of this citation culture in the systematic production of knowledge. Nowadays, a scientific publication is easily recognized by its footnotes and its references to other scientific articles and works. This is one of the elements that makes a scientific text so different from the work of a journalist or a fiction writer. The behavior of citations is largely a function of personal traits. Nevertheless, within a scientific field, the characteristics of a citation are more or less constant. One must therefore speak of a culture of citation in the plural. The sciences welcome a number of types of citation cultures, slightly different one from another. The development of the scientific publication since the beginning of the 19th century has provided a corpus of relatively stable citation cultures. The continuous and steady development of citation behavior in scientific publication has created a new resource for research and research policy: citation data. Its use has been very rapid. In hindsight, its use seems inevitable. In fact, if researchers cite a work that they have found useful, a work that is highly cited seems to be more useful to research than works that are not. Moreover, the number of times a document is cited seems to be an accurate way to measure its impact, its influence or its quality. The same is true for a group of papers concerning a scientist, a research group, a journal or even an institution. The more they are cited, the bigger is their influence. Citation frequency seems thus to be a good means to objectively measure the usefulness, the quality and the impact of science. Whatever one's opinions on citations, citation frequency is supposed to measure something that already exists. It is an indicator of the results of scientific activity. Citation analysis (the art of counting the number of citations) is a window on the communication system between scientists. This seminar will ask questions on the interpretation of the measure of science with citations. In fact, citation culture is not only an aggregate or a set of elements derived from citations. A citation, as used in scientometric analysis and by the indicators of science and technology, is not the same as the one produced by a scientist at his workstation. This is one of the first arguments of this seminar: a citation is produced by indexers and not directly by the scientist. The Science Citation Index is not simply a bibliographic tool. It creates a new image of science across the bibliographic references available in the scientific literature. This is how SCI provides a new representation of science. It creates an image of science in the same way that a telephone book creates a representation of the inhabitants of a city. This seminar will provide the opportunity to discuss the principal properties of this new representation of science and of its impact. It will also be an opportunity to discuss its implications for scientometrics and to show how this approach can redefine the theory of citation. SECOND SEMINAR AT 3:30 PM: HOW THE INTERNET TRANSFORMS SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH The Internet has profound consequences for science, the social sciences and the humanities. How science will change is not very clear, yet. This is due to the fact that the Internet is a recent phenomenon and is still being modified. The seminar will allow to take stock of different fields such as scientific communication, electronic journals, virtual libraries, distributed databases, intelligent agents, changes in the relationship between the private and the public, between researchers and commercial publishers, and new ways of working, the sum total creating a new phenomenon: Cyberscience. The seminar will mark a milestone in conceptualizing these new developments based on science and information science. Roger Coronini Univesite Pierre Mendes France INRA SERD Institut National de Recherche Agronomique Sociologie et Economie de la Recherche Developpement BP 47 38040 Grenoble cedex 9 Telephone :+33 (0) 4 76 82 54 56 Fax : +33 (0) 4 76 82 56 76 Email - professional : Roger.Coronini at upmf-grenoble.fr http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/adest/ http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/inra/ Email - personal : Roger.Coronini at asi.fr From jose.borbinha at BN.PT Fri Dec 10 05:53:43 1999 From: jose.borbinha at BN.PT (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Jos=E9_Luis_Borbinha?=) Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 10:53:43 -0000 Subject: ECDL2000 Message-ID: ============================================================== Call for Proposals ECDL2000 - The Fourth European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries 18-20 September 2000 - Lisbon, Portugal DEADLINE FOR ALL THE PROPOSALS: 1 May 2000 ============================================================== One major goal of the ECDL series of conferences is to bring together researchers, industrial members, professionals, user communities and responsible agents, promoting it as a reference forum for discussion of new emerging issues, requirements, proposals, politics and solutions. !! In this sense, ECDL2000 intends to contribute to bring !! into focus this complex scenario, promoting !! opportunities for the exchange of ideas and knowledge !! between all the different perspectives and communities !! relevant for digital libraries. -------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS Proposals for papers and panels related to digital libraries should address mainly the following topics: - Digital Library Requirements, Models, Systems and Frameworks (Metadata; Capturing; Indexing and Cataloguing; User Interfaces; Knowledge Representation; Filtering and Dissemination; Preservation; etc.); - Electronic Publishing and Economic Issues (New Publishing & Economic Models; Terms and Conditions for Access and Use; Intellectual Property and Rights Management; etc.); - Networking and Distributing Issues (Interoperability; Scalability; Networked Resource Discovery; Collaborative and Distributes Authoring; Collaborative and Distributes Resources Management; etc.); - Social Implications and Issues (User's Models; International Collaboration; Digital Libraries and Consortia; Multicultural and Multilingual Issues; New Emerging Issues; etc.). -------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR DEMONSTRATIONS AND POSTERS The conference organisers solicit proposals for demonstrations of innovative results, projects and products, as also for high quality posters with last minute results and proposals. A permanent space for those purposes will be available during all the conference time. -------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR WORKSHOPS Relevant post-conference workshops may be organised during the 21 September 2000. Workshops are supposed to be focused on specialised technical, organisational or political issues, and promoted by specific communities, projects, organisations, etc -------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR TUTORIALS High quality pre-conference tutorials on fundamental or advanced issues may be organised during the 17 September 2000. Tutorials are intended to be important opportunities for students and newcomers to contact with specialists in fundamental issues, as also for experienced participants to learn more about new emerging issues. -------------------------------------------------------------- SUBMISSIONS - Please check the details for submissions of proposals for papers, panels, demonstrations, posters, tutorials and workshops at - The proceedings will be published by Springer in the series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, both in printed and digital media (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html), - Selected papers may be published in the International Journal on Digital Libraries -------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES Deadline for All the Proposals: 1 May 2000 Notifications of acceptance: 15 June 2000 Camera ready versions of papers: 1 July 2000 -------------------------------------------------------------- ORGANISATION ECDL2000 is a co-organisation of the National Library of Portugal, INESC (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores), and IST (Instituto Superior T?cnico - Universidade T?cnica de Lisboa). The conference is also supported by ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics), and the DELOS Network of Excellency (supported by the European Commission). -------------------------------------------------------------- From gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU Sun Dec 12 16:37:12 1999 From: gwhitney at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU (Gretchen Whitney) Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 16:37:12 -0500 Subject: Citation Analysis in Tenure (fwd) Message-ID: Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 16:35:37 -0500 From: "Garfield, Eugene" CITATION ANALYSIS IN TENURE EVALUATION http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p354y1983.pdf http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v6p363y1983.pdf Over 15 years ago I published a two-part essay in Current Contents which can be accessed at the URL's listed above. My purpose in writing to SIGMET is to ask whether any member can tell me of any university or college which uses citation analysis in this way. In the UK the resarch assessment exercises are widely known and discussed as e.g. by Charles Oppenheim in the Journal of Documentation 53: (5) 477-487 DEC 1997. However, I cannot recall a specific study of tenure practices and wonder if any of you can inform me of any. Since tenure evaluation is such a sensitive subject it is understandable that many institutions or departments may not wish to disclose this information lest if affect particular cases. However, I am aware that librarians and information officers are frequently asked to do searches of the SCI and SSCI for these purposes. Naturally citation analysis is only factor in a tenure evaluation, but just an indication that citation analysis is routinely involved would perhaps permit me to answer the qustion that I am asked frequently--has the SCI affected the conduct of science. (See e.g. a recent interview published in the Chemical Intelligencer October 1999, p 26-31. To quote the editor Istvan Hargittai: "You introduced the SCI and changed the way scientists are employed, professors at universities are given tenure, and research journals are judges for their quality. This is heavy stuff...." If you would prefer to contact me directly please call me at 1-800-523-1850 or at the direct line 215-243-2205. Thank you. Eugene Garfield Eugene Garfield, President of ASIS Chairman Emeritus, ISI, 3501 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Publisher, THE SCIENTIST, 3600 Market St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 and www.the-scientist.com Tel: 215-243-2205 // Fax: 215-387-1266 email: garfield at codex.cis.upenn.edu Home Page: http://garfield.library.upenn.edu From isidro at CINDOC.CSIC.ES Fri Dec 17 12:32:12 1999 From: isidro at CINDOC.CSIC.ES (Isidro F. Aguillo) Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 18:32:12 +0100 Subject: New article in Cybermetrics Message-ID: Search Engine Results over Time - A Case Study on Search Engine Stability Cybermetrics, Vol. 2/3 (1998/9). Issue 1. December 1999 http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles/v2i1p1.html Judit Bar-Ilan (School of Library, Archive and Information Studies. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, 91904, Israel) judit at cc.huji.ac.il Abstract This paper examines the performance of search engines over time. The performance is not as expected: search engines loose information, relevant URLs that were retrieved at a given time by a certain search engine, were not retrieved by the same search engine at a later time, although they continued to exist and to be relevant. A closer examination of the these URLs revealed that not only URLs were dropped, but content was also lost for a large portion of these URLs: no other URL retrieved by the search engine contained the same information. As far as we know this aspect of the performance of search engines has not been thoroughly studied before. The problem is investigated through a case study, using the search phrase "informetrics OR informetric". The searches were carried out in one month intervals during a five months period between January and June 1998. An additional search round and comparison were carried out on June 1999. The six largest search engines at the time were examined. -- ********************************************************* Isidro F. AGUILLO isidro at cindoc.csic.es --------------------------------------------------------- CINDOC-CSIC Tel: +34-91-563.54.82 Joaquin Costa, 22 Fax: +34-91-564.26.44 28002 Madrid. ESPA?A/SPAIN Programas Europeos (www.info2000.csic.es/midas-net) Editor Cybermetrics (www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics) Oficina SOST (sost.cicyt.es) *********************************************************