Re: Science Citation Index

[jim stasheff <jds@math.upenn.edu>]

Michael,

at least in the old days,
multiauthor papers were listed only once
e.g. Milnor and Stasheff
only under Milnor

jim
 Barr wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>