PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

FEATURES

Data for each paper include: all author names, regardless of order of position; addresses with separate data elements for institutional name, department, section, lab, city, state, province, country; article title; journal title, including volume, beginning page number and year; document type; category; citation counts, both annual and total; and linked citing papers with the same type of bibliographic information as the source papers. In addition, the file includes baseline statistics for each paper to allow you to compare the actual citations for each paper to the expected citations for the paper, based upon the journal in which it was published, its age, and the type of article (review, note, abstract, letter, general article, etc.).

With this type of database, detailed bibliographic and citation data on every paper—the data can be searched, grouped, summarized, and ranked using any data elements, such as author names (all author names), institution, discipline, year, citation count, collaborating institutions or nations, etc. These data, in this database structure, allow virtually any type of analysis of output of papers and influence in terms of citations or citations per paper.

This is very important: Citation analysis is supplementary to, not a substitute for, peer review and other forms of expert evaluation. Especially at the level of an individual researcher's publication and citation record, many factors may influence whether a paper is cited much or little (see below). These numbers are best used to obtain a global view of a researcher's output and impact. They should be interpreted by persons knowledgeable of the work of the individual of interest. Splitting hairs over small differences is not recommended, whereas obtaining some broad view of an individual's output and impact is.

As always, the Golden Rule in using citation data is to compare like with like. There is no sense in comparing the citation record of a 60 year-old mathematics professor who has published 53 articles with that of a 28 year-old newly minted Ph.D. molecular biologist with 6 papers to her credit. Molecular biologists should be compared with other molecular biologists, electrical engineers with other electrical engineers, and so on. Too, one should realize that citation counts reflect utility most strongly in areas of basic research as compared with applied research, since in the latter realm use is often made of published information without a record of that use in the published literature (within a company, for example, where there is a lesser tendency to publish papers than in academia).

FORMATS AND DELIVERY OPTIONS

The data are delivered on CD in MS Access format with a custom Windows-based, or Web interface.