ABS: Marx, Angewandte Chemie in Light of the Science Citation Index

[Gretchen Whitney]

-----Original Message-----
From: Werner Marx [marx at and.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de]

"Angewandte Chemie in Light of the Science Citation Index"
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. V40(1), 139-143 (2001):

Angewandte Chemie has been published since 40 years in the version of both
a German and an International Edition (with different volume and page
numbers), which has led to a number of problems in citation analysis. In
its bibliographic source field the Science Citation Index (SCI) takes into
consideration only the International Edition. Consequently only the
citations of this edition are taken into account and the citations
exclusivly in the German Edition are ignored. Standard citation analysis
done by the method of "citation matching" (item by item procedure), in
which the publications under evaluation are selected in the SCI, result in
about a 20 percent underestimation on average. Another peculiarity causes
an even larger underestimation: Since 1996 the reviews in Angewandte Chemie
have begun with a full page picture, which is the starting page (first
page). In the bibliographic source field of SCI (and in the Chemical
Abstracts literature file as well) the starting page is sometimes stored
one count too high, which results in an extensive underestimation of the
reviews. Only the citations with the incorrect starting page (about 20-30
percent of all citations) are counted. Angewandte Chemie reviews are cited
almost twice as often as the articles (communications), but the number of
articles is about one order of magnitude higher. On the other hand double
citations in both the International and the German Edition of the same
papers result in an about 15 percent overestimation of the Journal Impact
Factor (JIF98). The reason for this seeming contradiction is the different
method used by ISI for determing the JIFs for their Journal Citation
Reports (JCR): These are calculated by the method of "journal title
matching", which investigates how often the specific journal names occur
within the reference section of SCI in combination with certain publication
years. It is shown that the JIF98 for Angewandte Chemie determined by ISI
is obviously valid for both Editions together and not only for the
International Edition. All investigations were done in SCI under STN
International.

Werner Marx

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Dr. Werner Marx
Max-Planck-Institut
fuer Festkoerperforschung
Informationsvermittlung
Postfach 800 665
D-70506 Stuttgart
Tel. ++-(0)711-689-1285 FAX ++-(0)711-689-1292
e-mail marx at and.mpi-stuttgart.mpg.de

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