Terje Tüür-Fröhlich,
""Needles to say my proposal was turned down." The early days of commercial citation Indexing, an "error-making" activity and its repercussions till today."
, in PhilPapers Foundation, 2019
Original Titel:
"Needles to say my proposal was turned down." The early days of commercial citation Indexing, an "error-making" activity and its repercussions till today.
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Today university rankings and
performance rankings (often based on JIFs,
h-indexes) are believed to be indispensable
to assure scientific ?quality?. Most of these
performance rankings employ citation data
provided by Thomson Reuters. TR?s current
influence on funding decisions, individual
careers, institutions, disciplines and countries
is immense and ambivalent. There is
increasing resistance against ?impactitis?
and ?evaluitis?. Usually overseen: Trivial
errors in TR?s citation indexes (SCI, SSCI,
AHCI) produce severe non-trivial effects:
Their victims are authors, institutions,
journals with names beyond the ASCIIcode
and scholars of humanities and social
sciences. Based on the Joshua Lederberg
Papers I claim: To overcome severe resistance
Eugene Garfield and Joshua Lederberg
had to foster overoptimistic attitudes and
to downplay the severe problems connected
to global and multidisciplinary citation
indexing. The dificulties to handle different
formats of references and footnotes, non-
Anglo-American names, and of publications
in non-English languages were known to the
pioneers of citation indexing.