Problems with Web of Science

[Asbjørn Dahl]

The inaccuracies of publication and citation indices are a well known
problem.
I have not done a thorough review of the literature, but you could read
more in this paper:
http://www.produ-science.udl.cat/psycho/public/p_1.pdf
Others might be able to chip in with additional sources.

The cleanliness of bibliometric data is a serious but hard issue. It is
often countered, however, by invoking the law of large numbers; as long as
huge amounts of publication data are used - the general trends should stand
out.


On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Mark Newman <mark at santafe.edu> wrote:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/**sigmetrics.html<http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html>
>
> I wonder if any of the Web of Science experts on this list could offer
> some advice.
>
> I've been looking at citation statistics for a subset of papers in my field
> and find serious errors in the WOS citations.  I'm wondering if this is a
> known issue and if it is likely to be fixed.
>
> As an example of what I'm talking about, consider this paper:
>
>   Infection dynamics on scale-free networks, R. M. May and A. L. Lloyd,
>   Physical Review E 64, 066112 (2001)
>
> A regular WOS search for this paper says that it was cited 72 times between
> 2001 and 2007, but zero times after that.  This looked odd to me, so I did
> a "cited reference search" for the same paper, which reveals what the
> problem is.  In cited reference search, the citations for this paper are
> divided between two variants (as is often the case with cited reference
> search), with one variant corresponding to the main WOS entry (the one with
> 72 citations), and the other not.  Both variants are correct in this case
> (no typos).  The only difference I can see is that the main WOS entry uses
> an abbreviated journal name "PHYS REV E", while the variant entry uses the
> full journal name "Physical Review E".  Other than that they appear to be
> basically the same.
>
> But here's the issue: the "variant" entry has 209 citations -- by far the
> majority of citations to this paper, and all citations after 2007.  In
> other words a straightforward search for this paper in WOS misses almost
> all (74 percent) of citations.  This is just one example paper, but I have
> found a number of other similar examples.
>
> Does anyone know what is going on here and if there is a way to fix it?
>
> Mark Newman
>
>
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