Tag Archive for 'Thomson Reuters'

Which master journal list do you prefer?

Published on July 9, 2009 in Databases. 0 Comments

A very useful resource which I need to consult, say, twice a year is master journal list of Thomson Reuters Scientific. This morning it was actully a colleage who needed this resource. Actually he wanted to know the journals covered by Web of Science. So he needed a subset of the Master Journal List. I knew that existsed but where?

Using Google we ended up on this version of the Master Journal List. Not the one I really wanted since it did not have the datase specific lists. I knew it existed but where? Only a couple of hours later, by approaching the site from a different angle, navigating around a wee bit more different I found the version of the Master Journal List, the version we were actually looking for.

Looking carefully I finally see that the first one is a more extensive journal search form of the Master Journal List. But that you can only find out after you’ve found the second website. You can navigate from the one to the other, but not the other way around. Little bit strange. Let alone confusing.

Actually in a similar vein. Thomson has a brand new product InCites, whereas the old totally different In-Cites website/product from the same company still exists.

2008 Journal Citation Reports figures released

Published on June 22, 2009 in Databases. 1 Comment

Last Friday Thomson Reuters released the 2008 edition of the Journal Citation Reports. This year it was announced by Thomson itself as a news release, that’s a good move from them. The number of journals reported in the two editions of the JCR have increased from 6417 in the Science edition to 6598 (181 more journals that is) and in Social Sciences edition the number of journals covered increased from 1865 to 1980 (an increase of 115 journals).It is still not the increase I expected on the basis of the addition of some 750 new regional journals which was announced last year, and that figure is now even advertised as an expansion of 1228 journals, but it is still an expansion of 300 journals. Albeit reading Thomson’s press releases on the 2008 JCR update I still notice some juggling with numbers that don’t really add, or don’t make sense after simple investigations when comparing the 2007 and 2008 issues.Now we have to go and figure out which were added, and more important, which journal were dropped. That’s always interesting to find out. It will take time though.The really major improvement Thomson should make, is to abolish the rather odd division between the two parts of the database. Currently I can’t find any arguments to stick to the demarcation lines between the Science edition and the Social Science edition of the JCR. I really wonder how many customers they have that subscribe to only one part of the JCR. I think it is fair to assume that by far most of the customers subscribe to both parts.For teaching it is just a pain, to have to explain students that they should start their search with choosing a database part. That is far from intuitive.

What’s inside In-Cites?

Published on March 13, 2009 in Databases. 0 Comments

The predecessor of Thomson Reuters Scientific has been responsible, for years already, for publishing the good old in-cites website. Today I was alerted on a new service by the same company. Incites?! A brand new product? Incites it is.

For me a bit confusing. Even today when I go to the old incites site a arrive here In-Cites. Okay. It carries the warning that the site has effecitvely moved to ScienceWatch.com. (In the unnoticable red bar at the top of the page). Fair enough. But the sole reason for me to use that website, or refer to in-cites is the journal lists. Follow the trail to the methdology section in Sciencewatch there you find a link to the journal list. With an additional click you end up here, where is stated:

The current Journal List is located on the archived in-cites.com Web site.

So you end up at in-cites.

What’s new at in-cites? Or what marketeer has thought up an old name from the same company for a new product?

I am interested in the new product, but at the moment I find it all a bit confusing.

Journal quality, an unexpected improvement of the JCR

Published on January 29, 2009 in Databases and Scientometrics. 1 Comment

It is odd to say, but for researcher the journal as an entity is disappearing. Scientist search for information in online databases and select from title and abstract information whether the article suits their needs. The days that scientists visited the library and browsed the table of contents of the most important journals to keep up with their field have long gone .

Still there is a lot of emotion around journals titles. Scientist want to publish their research in the best possible journal. Earlier this year the NOWT (2008) published a report on the performance of Dutch universities and there it was clearly shown that field normalized citation impact for each university correlated positively with the field normalized journal quality.
Journal quality versus Citation impact

Looking at this graph it is clear that there is considerable reason to selected the best journals in their field to publish your results. However, until recent the only widely available journal quality indicator has been the journal impact factor. There has been a lot of criticism on the uses and abuses of impact factors, but they have stood their time. All scientists are at least aware of impact factors. For years ISI, Thomson Reuters were in fact the sole gate keepers of journal quality rankings.

Over the last years a number of products, free and fee based, have tried to come up with new and competing journal ranking measures. SicmagoJR (based on Scopus data), journal analyzer from Scopus, Eigenfactor.org and the data from Thomson’s own Essential Science Indicators of course.

This week Thomson Reuters announced that they will update the journal citation report. From the 1st of February we get a entirely new Journal Citation Report. From the press release:

  • Five-Year Impact Factor - provides a broader range of citation activity for a more informative snapshot over time.
  • Journal “Self Citations” – An analysis of journal self citations and their contribution to the Journal Impact Factor calculation.
  • Graphic Displays of Impact Factor “Box Plots” - A graphic interpretation of how a journal ranks in different categories.
  • Rank-in-Category Tables for Journals Covering Multiple Disciplines - Allows a journal to be seen in the context of multiple categories at a glance rather than only a single one.

It is highly unusual to see two updates per year for JCR. But it is interesting to to note how they are moving under the pressure of some competition.

Literature:
NOWT (2008). Wetenschaps- en Technologie- Indicatoren 2008. Maastricht, Nederlands Observatorium van Wetenschap en Technologie (NOWT). http://www.nowt.nl/docs/NOWT-WTI_2008.pdf (in Dutch)

The mysterious ways of Web of Science

Published on December 31, 2008 in Information Retrieval and Scientometrics. 2 Comments

A while back, one of our researchers asked me how Steven Salzberg arrived at the number of citations for the paper on the Arabidopsis genome in Nature. When he checked Web of Science, it only delivered zero citations and that couldn’t be true for such a breakthrough paper. Peter found 2689 citations! How did he do that?

I checked out the paper in Web of Science myself first as well, and found also zero citations.

Zero citations from Web of Science for the Arabidopsis papers

I was not entirely surprised since I realized it was one of those consortium papers. I knew Thomson had some problems with a consortium paper in the past. But annoying it was.

I first checked about the issue around the human genome project and found it being mentioned even in Science Watch from Thomson. But from the article it appeared that Thomson only improved the tracking for citations from that Human Genome project paper, and not the raised issue per se. Even though the Arabidopdsis paper was even older the citations to this paper had not been corrected. It appeared that something in the searching or tracking of citations by WoS went wrong but where was the error being made?

I made a few futile attempts in the cited ref search with Arabidopsis as author, or Arabidopsis*. Searched in the cited ref search for Kaul as author (which is listed in the end of the original article as first author) but that only resulted in some 130 citations. Not sufficient to justify Steven Salzberg number of citations. I did not like to use the cited ref search to look for the cited articles from Nature in 2000 this is a very large result set that you have to wade through innumerable pages of results since you can’t refine these type of searches by volume or page numbers. (Wouldn’t that be nice?)

To reassure my inquisitive researcher I pointed him to Scopus (Sorry Thomson) where the he could see a reassuring 3000+ citations himself. Meanwhile I did not have a quick fix for this problem.

It was only later when I looked into the problem again, and somehow I was forwarded to the all databases search rather than the Web of Science search tab, which I normally use. To my utter amazement the title search delivered this time two records. Both with zero citations, but more importantly it showed next to [Anon] Ar Gen In, as the author.

Zero citations from Web of Science for the Arabidopsis papers

Now the problem was simple. I had found the author. A cited ref search yielded indeed nearly the 2689 citations from Steven Salzberg.

Zero citations from Web of Science for the Arabidopsis papers

But these figures are not entirely correct either since there are some additional 131 citations to be found with Kaul as a first author reference to Nature with the correct volume and page number.

Of course I requested at Web of Science a correction of the citation data, but forgot to include Kaul’s citations. Hopefully this will be repaired at a later date.

But what makes me really wondering is the slight -but very important- difference in record presentation between the All Databases search and the Web of Science search  on Web of Knowledge. For me personally the standard entry in Web of Knowledge is the Web of Science tab. Not in my normal working routine would I ever go to the all databases tab to look up a number of citations. Just by luck I found the right author name on this occasion. But it shouldn’t have to become the standard way to perform searches shouldn’t it?

Thomson Reuters adds citation maps to Web of Science

Published on July 21, 2008 in Databases. 0 Comments

New citation map feature from Web of Science

A while ago Thomson Reuters heralded their new database Thomson Innovation. One of the strong points of their new platform are the visualization tools such as the citation maps. With these tools, users can quickly analyze patents cited as references by the focal-patent, as well as those that have since cited it. An article in R&D Magazine described the tool in more detail.

This evening I found out that these citation maps have been introduced in Web of Science as well. Still in beta. But it is a nice spill over from the new Thomson Innovation platform. It allows you to browse from article to article. It is indeed visually very attractive. I have to play around with it a little more before I will fully comprehend the real advantages.

Another database that has these citation maps a little longer already is Highwire, but those I have never used seriously. See what we can learn from the comparison in the near.

Just noticed that the feature was announced in the June 2008 update of the “What’s New?” items. What I noticed there as well that you finally can use your browser back buttons on Web of Science. WoW! That’s what is called innovation.

Thomson Reuters issues a press release on the JCR 2007

Published on July 3, 2008 in Databases. 1 Comment

It just popped up in my RSS feed on the second of July. The official press release from Thomson Reuters is dated July 1st, announcing the new edition of the Journal Citation Reports 2007. There is no further mention of the new journals included or excluded. There is a link to the official promotional website of JCR, which still states:

  • Covers more than 7,500 of the world’s most highly cited, peer-reviewed journals in approximately 200 disciplines
  • The Science Edition covers over 5,900 leading international science journals from the Thomson Reuters database
  • The Social Sciences Edition covers over 1,700 leading international social sciences journals from the Thomson Reuters database

It actually struck me today that the journals included in JCR are not listed at their Master Journal List.

Shall we call it progress that Thomson is confirming what I blogged about some two weeks ago?

JCR 2007 releases new impact factors

Published on June 19, 2008 in Databases. 3 Comments

June is always the time to look out for the newest update of the Journal Citation Reports. Yesterday I checked and they weren’t there yet. Today the JCR was updated and included the 2007 figures.

You can leave it at that. We subscribe to this databases, and it has been updated. That’s all.

For the Journal Citation Reports which is updated only once a year that simple message will not suffice in my opinion. Only Thomson Reuters Scientific doesn’t appear to share my view. JCR is an important database. On the release of the latest figures, armies of researchers want to consult the database to see whether the journal on which editorial board they are has increased its Impact Factor. Or they use it to judge where to submit their next set of articles.

When the Essential Science Indicators are updated, once every two months. The event is accompanied with a slew of information from Thomson. When the even more popular database of JCR is updated we don’t receive any information whatsoever.

We have to find out ourselves that the coverage of journals has been expanded, growing from 6166 in the 2006 JCR Science edition to 6417 in the 2007 edition. For the JCR Social Science edition the number of journals covered increased with 97 journals to a total of 1865 journals. Which journals? We are left to guess for ourselves. Some Spanish journals they have worked out.

Thomson Reuters Scientific knows, but they haven’t told us (yet). Some journals have been dropped from the list. We only have to find out ourselves which ones. The increase in journals this year is only a prelude to the increase which we might expect next year since they have included some 700 new regional journals in Web of Science.

I might be mistaken, but at first sight there must be some interesting news worthy facts in the yearly update of JCR. Worthy of informing at least your subscribing librarians, who can on their turn inform their users. We want to inform our users on these events. We are more than willing to promote your products. Thomson, you can facilitate this work a whole lot better, but you should inform us a whole lot better than this.