Problems with Web of Science

[Yves Gingras]

This problem is well known and can be obivated by a searching  strategy that
does NOT use the name of the journal in the query but only the author, year
of publication, volume of the journal  and first page of the paper.


Yves Gingras

Le 08/08/13 09:32, « Mark Newman » <mark at SANTAFE.EDU> a écrit :

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> 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
> 



Professeur 
Département d'histoire
Centre interuniversitaire de recherche
sur la science et la technologie (CIRST)
Chaire de recherche du Canada en histoire
et sociologie des sciences
Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST)
UQAM
C.P. 8888, Succ. Centre-Ville
Montréal, Québec
Canada, H3C 3P8

Tel: (514)-987-3000-7053
Fax: (514)-987-7726

http://www.chss.uqam.ca
http://www.cirst.uqam.ca
http://www.ost.uqam.ca