silent changes in WoS

[Vladimir Pislyakov]

Dear colleagues,

Have anyone noticed changes of the publication indicators in the Web of
Science databases when they transformed "ISI Proceedings" into "Conference
Proceedings Citation Index" (now a part of the WoS)?

For example. Before this transformation, in September 2008, we counted
number of Russian papers of the type "Article" published in 2006 (in SCIE
and SSCI databases). It was 23367. After that, in November (transformation
of the Proceeedings took place in the middle of October) the same search
produced a much smaller figure. Now the same search string

(CU=Russia) AND (PY=2006) AND Document Type=(Article)

produces just 20601 documents.

It may be suggested that some of the documents have changed their "Document
Type" field in the process of merging of new Proceedings Index, and so
"Articles" got some other type.

It is very sad for us, because every year we publish in print statistics on
Russian publication output by document types and these changes result in the
loss of coherence of our yearly data. Have someone else confronted these
silent changes in WoS? Is there any way to overcome these inconsistencies?
There is even no note on WoK platfrom regarding these changes.

Vladimir Pislyakov 
Assistant Director for Electronic Resources Management 
Higher School of Economics Library 
20 Myasnitskaya street 
Moscow, 101000 
Russia 
Tel.: +7 (495) 6213785
Fax: +7 (495) 6287931
E-mail: pislyakov at hse.ru 
URL: http://library.hse.ru