Problems with Web of Science

[Howard White]

The problem is so severe and so well-known that I actually coined a name for such variants in citation data and have used it in several publications: "allonyms." For example, in Web of Science data the information scientist Karen Sparck Jones appears as both "Jones KS" and Sparckjones K." Henry Small is cited as both "Small H" and as "Small HG," sometimes in the same paper. It seemed to me that the term was needed because such variants are not really synonyms in the usual linguistic sense. Allonyms occur in names of journals and books, as well as authors, throughout citation indexes.

Howard White

From: Mark Newman <mark at SANTAFE.EDU<mailto:mark at SANTAFE.EDU>>
Reply-To: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU<mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>>
Date: Thursday, August 8, 2013 3:32 PM
To: "SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU<mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>" <SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU<mailto:SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU>>
Subject: [SIGMETRICS] Problems with Web of Science


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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