Dana Roth on citation indexing

[Stevan Harnad]

On 9-Mar-06, at 10:45 PM, George Porter wrote (for Dana Roth):

>In answer to Stevan Harnad ... the Citebase website specifically warns
>that "Citebase is currently only an experimental demonstration. Users
>are cautioned not to use it for academic evaluation yet. Citation
>coverage and analysis is incomplete and hit coverage and analysis is
>both incomplete and noisy."

And you think that precisely the same thing cannot be made about
citeseer and google scholar? That health warning was responsibly
placed there to discourage premature use of an experimental  tool as
an evaluative instrument, but that certainly doesn't mean that the
tool is not every bit as worthy of evaluation as an experimental tool
as the others that were evaluated (but did not bother to append a
health warning)...

http://www.citebase.org/help/#impactwarning

Citebase has a number of futuristic features that none of the other
citation engines have and it would be a pity of Tim Brody's
innovations were overlooked because of his prudence about making sure
no one rushes to performance reviews before the OA database comes
closer to 100% and the new measures are properly validated.

Stevan Harnad