Science Citation Index

["R Brown" <ronnie.profbrown@btinternet.com>]

There is also available the report from the IMU as follows:

http://www.mathunion.org/publications/report/citationstatistics/

It should be emphasised  that the ethics and practice of citation for an
individual paper are unclear and probably untaught, except possibly through
the admonishments of editors. Certainly scholarship in itself is generally
unrewarded. What gets the most fame is a solution to a famous problem; and
this is partly because the judgement of the achievement is easy, and could
almost be set up as a computer program, as for tennis rankings. Opening new
areas, or problem formulation, gives a more difficult task to assess: as
they say, predicting the future has its problems. And it may take many years
or decades for the true implications to sink in.

Should a citation be to the original paper, or to the most recent and
possibly best exposition (the latest author has the advantage of someone
else doing the spadework)? There is always an attraction in citing a famous
author, which gives a certain cachet, even if the idea came from someone
relatively unknown. There is the practice of changing terminology, so that
the original paper looks old fashioned, and in any case dealt with oomla
when `everyone' nowadays calls it bamloo.

How far back in the history of an idea or technique should citations go?

There is no established framework for good practice in citations dealing
with all these matters.

Thus the idea of using citations as a basis for assessment of importance is
hazardous in the extreme. This is emphasised in the IMU report.

Will the national Mathematical Societies be prepared to speak out publicly
on these key issues; or be willing to beard the Thomson/ISI lion; or subject
the basis of what ISI call `Essential Science' to ridicule; or state
publicly that the ISI journal evaluation process has little open quality
assurance?

Ronnie