silent changes in WoS

[Vladimir Pislyakov]

Exactly, Jonathan. These are my feelings too. Moreover, we conduct a
research which started before the change and now we thought to get some
additional data from WoS. And it seems that we have to gather all data again
from the beginning...

Kind regards,
Vladimir


==========

On Fri, 6 Feb 2009 03:01:54 -0800, Jonathan Levitt <jonathan at LEVITT.NET> wrote:

>Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
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>
>Dear Colleagues, 
>В 
>Vladimir has highlighted a problem of concern to me as a bibliometrician
using WoS data.В  Whilst I understand that journals may be added
retroactively to Web of Science databases, I was astonished to read that
that the same query can result in a 12% difference in the reported number of
matches.
>В 
>Could WoS assure bibliometricians that they will seek to avoid making large
retroactive changes to the contents of the SSCI and SCI?В В  I would not
like to have to add to my articles the limitation that my findings could be
affected by large changes to the contents of WoS of which I am unaware?
>В 
>Kind regards,
>Jonathan Levitt.
>В В 
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>В 
>Date:В В В  Thu, 5 Feb 2009 06:37:46 -0500
>From:В В В  Vladimir Pislyakov <pislyakov at HSE.RU>
>Subject: silent changes in WoS
>В 
>Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
>http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
>В 
>Dear colleagues,
>В 
>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)?
>В 
>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
>В 
>(CU=Russia) AND (PY=2006) AND Document Type=(Article)
>В 
>produces just 20601 documents.
>В 
>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.
>В 
>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.
>В 
>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 
>В 
>В