ART: SLoan, Citation analysis in a Web-based world (fwd)

[Gretchen Whitney]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Forwarded with permission.  --gw

Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2000 10:47:47 -0600
From: "Sloan, Bernie" <bernies at UILLINOIS.EDU>
To: JESSE at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU

About a month ago I was playing around in Web of Science, looking for
citations to a couple of my papers. For some reason the idea came to me to
try looking for citations outside of the usual citation index tools. I
started with some general full text journal databases (Gale's Expanded
Academic ASAP and EBSCO's Academic Search Elite) using my name and/or
various paper titles as search arguments. Then I moved on to several Web
search engines (e.g., AltaVista, Google, Northern Light) using the same
search strategies. I pulled the results together and created the following
Web page:

http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/pci.html

While I did this out of personal curiousity, I'm interested to hear from
others who may have done the same thing. What value do you think you derived
from the exercise? Did you find out anything interesting about how your
publications are used?

I'm also curious to hear from folks who haven't done something like this, to
see if you think this is a worthwhile exercise. Would this be a useful way
for faculty to track the impact of their published work (both print and
Web-based) for the promotion and tenure process? Also, how do you judge the
relative importance of a citation from a Web resource, rather than a
citation from a journal article? If your paper is cited in a journal article
(especially a refereed journal), that's one thing. But since the quality of
Web-based resources varies so much, do these somehow count for "less"?

Guess I am thinking that, as the Web continues to change the way people both
seek and publish information, how will we treat Web-based literature in
gathering and analyzing citations?

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
338 Henry Administration Building
506 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL  61801
Phone:  (217) 333-4895
Fax:      (217) 333-6355
E-mail:  bernies at uillinois.edu