Re: Science Citation Index

[Michael Barr <barr@math.mcgill.ca>]

Don't know about Cahiers, but Bob has repeatedly tried to get them to
index TAC and it is like hitting a blank wall.

The editors of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science have just sent
a very strong letter to the EC which has decided to use the citation
indices (there are apparently more than one) in a formal way.  The
American editors seemed to say, that they were used very little for tenure
or hiring purposes in the US and, to my knowledge (from tenure decisions
at McGill but at least in the early 90s never used by the main granting
agencies.

But above and beyond that, there was a time when I was actually using the
citation index for its stated purpose.  It was when I was starting my work
on duality and I wanted to know to what extent the Pontrjagin duality had
been extended to classes of topological abelian groups larger than that of
locally compact groups.  Every useful for that, but not if it
gratuitously omits certain journals.

One of the strongest points made is that the citations often go to
derivative works rather than the original.  This is not malice on the part
of authors; often the derivative source is simply a better, clearer,
whatever, source than the original.

In a similar way, you cannot judge a mathematician from the number of his
students.  Gauss had only 8 students, and four of them, including three of
the best known (Dedekind, Sopie Germain, and Riemann had exactly none).
But he has, in toto, close to 45,000 descendants, over 70% of whom were
descendants of someone named Christain Gerling, whom I had never heard of
until I just looked it up.  My guess is that most of us are descended from
Gauss (I am).  Gustav Herglotz had 1278 descendants nearly all of whom
descend from one student: Emil Artin (my doktorgrandfather).

My point is that these things are simply not decent measures of value or
influence.  The ISI is useful for some things and useless for others,
including making this kind of judgment.  That's what people are good at.

Michael


On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, John Baez wrote:

> Dear category theorists -
>
> Thomson Scientific runs the well-known "Science Citation Index", which
> "provides researchers, administrators, faculty, and students with quick,
> powerful access to the bibliographic and citation information they need to
> find relevant, comprehensive research data".  I believe data from this index
> is used in tenure and promotion decisions at some universities.
>
> I just heard that "Theory and Applications of Categories" and "Cahiers" are
> not listed on the Science Citation Index, while - for example - Elsevier's
> journal "Homeopathy" is listed there.
>
> Is this true?  Is there some way to improve the situation?
>
> Best,
> jb
>
>