Personal Citation Index

[Ronald Rousseau]

Personal Citation Index

Since 'always' I have been trying to collect citations to my works (just out of
personal curiosity).

If everyone did this and results were put together, this could give an idea
about the real coverage of the Web of Science. My guess is that it is certainly
less than 50% of all citations.

Such studies would show which types of articles end up in books (more than in
published articles), or on webpages (more than in published articles). Which
ones are popular among students (ending up in master's theses, or homeworks
published on the Internet). The possibilities for comparisons and
investigations are immense. I guess no one (in the West) knows how often he or
she is cited in local Russian, Japanese or Chinese articles or books.

At the moment data collection for 'personal citations' can only be done on a
personal basis (but groups of persons can look out for each other's citations,
especially in printed-only works). I hope that in the future, this kind of
investigations will be much easier ('everything' becoming electronic). It
certainly is one of the promises of the semantic web.

Ronald Rousseau
Belgium