Using Data from Citation Indexes for Personnel Decisions: Important Points to Consider

One use of the Web of Science (ISI) Citation Indexes is to conduct cited reference searches for the publications of job candidates or faculty members being considered for tenure. Because such decisions carry with them a significant commitment for the individual under consideration and for the university, it is important to understand the capabilities and the limitations of the Web of Science (ISI) Citation Indexes.

Coverage

The Web and print versions of the ISI Citation Indexes cover different periods of time. The chart below summarizes the dates of coverage. If you need to find all cited references for a work published before 1977, you should use the print version in addition to the Web version.
 

	Print version	Web version
Science Citation Index	1961-1996	1977-present
Social Sciences Citation Index	1966-1995	1977-present
Arts & Humanities Citation Index	1976-1995	1977-present

The Web of Science (ISI) indexes only index articles in scholarly journals. They do not index monographs, conference proceedings, or other forms of scholarly communication. These types of publications may appear as Cited References, but not as source publications.

For example, you can use the citation indexes to find out how many times Sigmund Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams has been cited in articles in psychology journals in the last ten or twenty years. However, you cannot use the citation indexes to find out how many books or conference papers have cited Freud (or any other scholar) whether that person's work appeared as a book, article, or conference paper. In some disciplines virtually all original research is published in journals, so this may not be a problem. In other disciplines, some research appears in books in addition to journal articles, and searchers should be aware of this limitation.

Accuracy of the Data

Cited references are entered into the ISI databases exactly as they appear in the published article. References to a single work may vary in several details which will affect the results of your search.

Names

An individual author's name may be given with first initial only, or with first and middle initials. This may occur because the cited author used different forms of his or her name in different publications, or because the citing author omitted the middle initial. It is also possible for surnames to be mispelled due to clerical error.

Cited Reference entries in the Web of Science (ISI) databases include only the first author of a publication, not second or subsequent authors. Also, the search results for a Cited Reference search will include self-citations. At present, the ISI search engine does not include an option to exclude self-citations; this must be done manually by examining the results.

Volume and Page Numbers

In some fields, the standard format is for a footnote to give, not the page numbers for an entire article, but only the specific page being cited. However, even if the entire article is cited, the Web of Science (ISI) database will give only the number of the first page. Therefore, your search results might include ten references where the article's page number is given as page 2303 (the first page) and five references where the article's page number is given as 2306 (the fourth page of the article). To retrieve all the citations to that article in the ISI database, you would select both versions.

In addition to the practice of citing individual pages within an article, volumes and page numbers for journal articles may be incorrect due to clerical error.

Source Abbreviations

Finally, while ISI has established a standard set of abbreviations for the journals they index, citing authors may not apply them consistently and there are no standard abbreviations for titles of books, conference proceedings, or other publications. For example, Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind may be abbreviated as GONE WIND or as GONE WITH WIND, and authors may cite the first edition published in 1936, a reprint published in 1968, or an anniversary edition published in 1975. A translation would also be a separate cited reference.

Obtaining the Best Search Results

Because the forms of cited references to a single publication may vary so widely, the most reliable strategy is to construct searches as broadly as possible and then examine results closely to eliminate unwanted entries. You may truncate terms with an asterisk (*) to allow for variations in spelling of names, source titles, and years of publication. Within the Cited Author and Cited Year fields you may enter multiple terms separated by OR. For even broader retrieval you may leave the Cited Work and/or the Cited Year field blank.

For help in using the Web of Science (ISI) citation indexes, please contact the MSU Libraries' Main Library Reference Desk at 353-8818. Or, contact the subject specialist in your discipline. We are always available to assist you.
 

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