Thomson ISI and NEC Team Up to Index Web-based Scholarship

[Thomas Krichel]

  Sloan, Bernie writes

> Philadelphia, PA USA-London UK-Princeton, NJ February 25, 2004 -
> Today, Thomson ISI and NEC Laboratories America (NEC) announced
> their collaboration to create a comprehensive, multidisciplinary
> citation index for Web-based scholarly resources.

  As far as traditional scholarly research papers are concerned,
  there are only two organized large aggregates of papers that are outside
  the journal process. These are arXiv.org (founded by Paul Ginsparg)
  and RePEc (founded by myself). Both of these systems already
  have open access autonomous citation indexing systems attached
  to them, CiteBase and CitEc, respectively. Thomson ISI have approached
  both of us. I understand that none of us have any immediate
  plans to set up priviledged access to our collections for them.

> The new Web Citation IndexTM will combine a suite of technologies
> developed by NEC, including "autonomous citation indexing" tools
> from NEC's CiteSeer environment, with the capabilities underlying
> ISI Web of KnowledgeSM. Thomson ISI editors will carefully monitor
> the quality of this new resource to ensure all indexed material
> meets the Thomson ISI high-quality standards.

  It will be quite difficult for Thomson ISI to implement quality
  standards once they venture out to the open Web. Other proprietary
  information providers should have learned that. I remember
  a couple of years ago gleefully finding some grossly inappropriate
  material on Nexis. The morale here is that they will have
  to rely on others to do at least part of the quality filtering
  for them.


  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                      mailto:krichel at openlib.org
                                 http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                             RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel