Problems with Web of Science

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Deer Mark,

In: Caveats for the Use of Citation Indicators in Research and Journal
Evaluations <http://www.leydesdorff.net/cit_indicators/index.htm>, Journal
of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(2),
278-287, 2008, I had a Table 4 as follows:

  Incorrect journal abbreviations and non-ISI sources

Citations

*J Phys Chem-US*

54,139

*Phys Rev*

32,352

*Biochim Biophys Acta*

26,108

*Communication*

22,062

*Am J Physiol*

14,716

*Unpub*

14,020

*Am J Med Genet*

13,467

*J Bone Joint Surg*

13,405

*J Biomed Mater Res*

12,962

*J Chem Soc Perk T 1*

11,870

*Am Rev Respir Dis*

11,033

*P Soc Photo-Opt Ins*

10,817

*Acta Metall Mater*

10,310

*Mmwr-Morbid Mortal W*

10,208


*Table 4*: Non-ISI sources and incorrect journal abbreviations with more
than 10,000 citations in the *JCR* 2005.

I had hoped that this was improved with the introduction of v5 of WoS since
then (but I never checked).

Best,
Loet



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
>
>


-- 
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Honorary Professor, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
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