RE: Open access and impact factors ( was: Open access and the ALA)

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

My search strategies took a number of different directions. The Institute
for Scientific Information's (ISI) Science Citation Index and Social
Science Citation Index were a natural choice. I used three search engines
(Google, AltaVista, Alltheweb), coupled with three Web-based full-text
journal article databases to which I had access, and with which I was
familiar (the Gale Group's Expanded Academic ASAP, EBSCO's Academic Search
Elite, and H.W. Wilson's Library Literature and Information Full Text). I
used various forms of my name as search arguments (e.g., "bernie sloan",
"sloan, bernie", "sloan, b"), as well as the title, or portions of the
title, of this paper. I attempted an on-the-fly evaluation of Web sites in
my search results, and did not include a number of sites that did not seem
particularly significant, or sites that were largely redundant with
others.

-----Original Message-----
From: Heather Morrison [mailto:hmorrison@ola.bc.ca] 
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2004 9:02 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Open access and impact factors ( was: Open access and the ALA)

Bernie, this is fascinating, and points to what I hope is another aspect
of the debate in regards to the changes needed in scholarly
communications.

Peer review is only one way of determining the quality and impact of an
author.

Shakespearian academic folks around the world, for example, have their
work evaluated through peer review.  But could anyone argue that there is
a single peer-reviewed item in this discipline that matches the quality
and impact of the works of Shakespeare - who, I suspect, never heard of
peer review?

Bernie - or anyone - do you have any suggestions as to how those of us who
don't read quite as much as you appear to, might go about gathering a
personal citation index.

cheers,

Heather Morrison