seeking guidance

[Johannes Stegmann]

Dear Karen,

You are definitely not silly, and I would not dare to tag such an 
attribute to Thomson-ISI which is a commercial enterprise, but I am 
certainly not the only one who thinks they could catch up, at least a 
little bit, with PubMed which allows to download the entire retrieval 
set even if it contains more than hundred thousand records 
(>100,000). However, PubMed records lack the cited references. But 
with the Web of Science (WoS) you have no chance to automate the 
download of the full records corresponding to the cited references. 
You should cooperate with an institution which owns the CD-ROM 
versions. As ar as I could see your Welch library holds at least some 
cumulations of the CD-versions. So, as always, first ask your librarian ...

Anyway, a small part of your research question might be solved by 
Gene Garfields Histcite program which (inter alia) provides you with 
the LCS, the LOCAL CITATION SCORE which "is the number of times a 
paper is cited by other papers in the local 
collection"  (http://www.histcite.com/). I am sure, Gene will supply 
you with a free version ( the commercial version will be released in 
July, as I learned a few moments ago), but he certainly still enjoys 
the days in good Old Europe following the ISSI conference in Madrid.

Best whishes and regards,

Johannes

Dr. Johannes Stegmann
Berlin, Germany
email: johannes.stegmann at onlinehome.de
homepage: http://www.johannesstegmann.de/