ABS&Comment: Alloro

[Johannes Stegmann]

At 18:52 01.09.99 -0400, you wrote:

>
>TITLE:  Searching institute for scientific information databases at the
>Deutsches Institut fur Medizinische Dokumentation und Information, Cologne
>AUTHOR   Alloro G, Ugolini D
>JOURNAL JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE 25: (4) 295-305 1999
>

May I append some remarks to the paper by Alloro and Ugolini:

DIMDI's CALL REFERENCES function described in the article may also be
applied to documents retrieved from other than ISI databases. Thus, it is
possible to conduct an automatic citation analysis to
papers/journals/authors retrieved from MEDLINE, EMBASE etc.
The citing papers, of course, are retrieved from SCISEARCH/SOCIAL SCISEARCH.
However, one must be attentive to the search-strings which are built
automatically after invoking the CALL REFS command: when we apply the
command to documents retrieved from SCISEARCH/SOCIAL SCISEARCH, then the
reference strings (which are use for retrieval of the citing papers) are
built according to the form:

    <NAME> <INITIAL(s)>,YYYY,V<No>,P<No>

where YYYY denotes the publication year, V means Volume, and P starting page.
Because of ISI's database-wide consistent treatment of the SOURCE field,
there will be a volume number probably for each article in the ISI
databases which is correctly converted to the appropriate reference string
by the CALL REFS algorithm.
On the contrary, when we start with documents from non-ISI databases, the
reference-string is built according to

    <NAME> <INITIAL(s)>,YYYY,V<?>,P<No>

where the question mark "?" stands for truncation, i.e. if two (or more)
references in SCISEARCH/SOCIAL SCISEARCH are different only with respect to
the volume number, the corresponding citing papers for both references are
retrieved if CALL REFS is applied to papers retrieved from non-ISI databases.
One can have a look at the reference strings actually built and used for
retrieval of the citing papers by means of the SHOW REPORT=STAT; FIELD=RF
command (this gives an unexpensive survey of reference strings).
There are other possible errors, e.g. in MEDLINE only two initials are
added to author names whereas three initials are used in ISI databases (if
appropriate).
In addition, there are limits of data handlings by the DIMDI system which
might turn out as a serious problem analyzing lots of data.

On the whole, however, this DIMDI function is a good way to determine
citation rates for non-ISI papers, but - searching multiple database
simultaneously (DIMDI's superbase mode) - one should start with
SCISEARCH/SOCIAL SCISEARCH so that the duplicates are removed from the
non-ISI databases in order to prevent such errors as far as possible.

Johannes Stegmann


-------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Johannes Stegmann      Univ. Hospital Benjamin Franklin
Free University Berlin     Medical Library
stegmann at ukbf.fu-berlin.de Hindenburgdamm 30
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