[Thomson Reuters response to Larsen & von Ins (in press)]

[Kim Hamilton]

I have to correct Kevin in his comments about the National Science Indicators (NSI). Upon first reading the Larsen, et al paper, I too thought NSI referred to what is reported in the NSF's biennial Science & Engineering Indicators (SEI), but in fact I believe it is a Thomson product.

The database on which SEI is built is in fact the SCI, and always has been, although starting in 1988 fully covered journals in the SSCI were added (caveat: journals in what we categorize as Professional Fields (Mgmt & Bus, Educ, Law, etc) have not been included as NSF does not track those subfields). And, to correct Larsen, et al, only Articles, Notes, and Reviews are counted, not Letters. NSF fully documents what is included and how counts are made in their SEI reports.

Kevin is correct that the list of journals included in SEI can be obtained through Lawrence Burton.

Kim Hamilton
SEI principal investigator
ipIQ (dba The Patent Board and formerly CHI Research)
khamilton at patentboard.com

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Kevin Boyack
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 2:26 PM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] [Thomson Reuters response to Larsen & von Ins (in press)]


Regarding your questions below:

-          Up until 2007, when I was at Sandia, the AISTI group (a group of national labs and some universities) licensed SCIE (and SSCI ...) and hosted it at LANL. I would presume that they have not since downgraded to SCI.

-          Yes, versioning makes a huge difference, and most authors in info science/bibliometrics seem to know the difference, although some seem not to.

-          And, the National Science Indicators uses NEITHER the SCI or SCIE. It uses a hand-picked set of about 5000 journals from the ISI indexes (curated historically by CHI - Fran Narin's shop - and now by iPiQ) that was probably very similar to SCI back in the 1970s, and which is now probably akin to an SCI++, but certainly containing far less than SCIE. So, the NSI numbers are not easily compared to anything else out there. If anyone is interested in the exact list of journals used by NSI, they can contact Lawrence Burton at NSF.

Best regards,
Kevin

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Pikas, Christina K.
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 10:32 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] [Thomson Reuters response to Larsen & von Ins (in press)]

-  Apparently it's not correct to say that SCIE is the online version of SCI.  Is there an offline batch download or mail-a-hard-drive version of the SCIE?
- Do the national labs and others that have locally loaded versions get the SCI or SCIE?
- You all seriously still PRINT the SCI?  Really? Wow. (not a serious question)
- Presumably which version you're using makes a huge difference to your analysis and conclusions - do all authors indicate which they're using (I know some do)?
- Are the National Science Indicators really using SCI or really using SCIE? I know some European countries use Thomson Reuters data - are they all using the same data? All SCI, all SCIE, some of each, no one knows?

Christina Pikas


----
Christina K Pikas
Librarian
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Christina.Pikas at jhuapl.edu
(240) 228 4812 (DC area)
(443) 778 4812 (Baltimore area)




From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu] On Behalf Of James Testa
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 11:30 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu
Subject: [SIGMETRICS]


The Authors have derived their figures and conclusions from the SCI (Science Citation Index), a subset of the SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded).  The SCI is intentionally cultivated to be a relatively small collection of high impact journals and excellent regional journals.  The SCIE, on the other hand,  is a comprehensive citation index covering all science journals selected by Thomson Reuters through its Journal Selection Process.  Additionally, the authors did not take into account that conference proceedings are indexed primarily in the CPCI (Conference Proceedings Citation Index), at a rate of nearly 400,000 records from approximately 12,000 conferences each year.

I have provided a brief commentary that describes and quantifies the content of the major indexes in the Web of Science. I would invite the authors and any others who are interested to view it here<http://community.thomsonreuters.com/t5/Citation-Impact-Center/Web-of-Science-Coverage-Expansion/ba-p/10663>. I welcome any feedback or further discussion on the subject.


1.       Larsen, P.O. and vo Ins, M. "The rate of growth in scientific publications and the decline of coverage provided by Science Citation Index."  Scientometrics. Online First, published 10 March 2010.   DOI: 10.1007/s11192-010-0202-z<http://springerlink.metapress.com/content/2531345r116v3660/?p=e51d977a30124382bc1888ab01ee9630&pi=26>


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