Severe Inconsistencies Web of Science V4 / V5

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Hermann, 

 

The database is always dynamic. Journals are added and sometimes backtracked
from the perspective of hindsight. I would not expect V4 and V5 to be very
similar. For example, my own publication record went up with 10 new
publications. J

 

Best wishes, 

Loet

 

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR), 
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. 
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-842239111
 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 

 

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics
[mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU] On Behalf Of Hermann Schier
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 4:17 PM
To: SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Severe Inconsistencies Web of Science V4 / V5

 


the relaunch of Web of Science this week was not really a smooth transition
from
V4 to V5. Today the system starts to work again but now we encounter 
inconsistencies in citation counts between V4 and V5 which prohibits the use
Web of Science at the moment.

I compiled as example a comparison of the the articles in the Hirsch core of
Manuel Cardona, who is a well known solid state physicist.

An citation report in both version brings up a stunning difference in Hirsch
factor: 99 versus 89

	
Results found

Sum of the Times Cited

h-index


WoS V4

1265

46514

99


WoS V5

1308

46605

89


Then I compared the the articles one by one and found a lot of highly cited
papers are missing in V5,
please have a look in the attached excel file.

At the moment I have no clue for this unsettling findings, but most of the
articles are from Physical Review series
where citation linking was always notoriously clumsy.

Does anybody else encounter similar problems?
Web of Science is a major resource for our scientists and it is really sad 
that I have strongly advice against usage of Web of Science at the moment. 

Regards

Hermann




-- 
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Dr. Hermann Schier
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Festkoerperforschung
Informationsvermittlung der CPT-Sektion
Heisenbergstr. 1, D-70569 Stuttgart
Tel. ++-(0)711-689-1284 FAX ++-(0)711-689-1292
e-mail: h.schier at fkf.mpg.de
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