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

Bernie is right, impact measurement is important to authors. Online
publishing and especially open access provision will enable new Web impact
metrics to appear, but they will need to be easier to calculate than
Bernie's method, and this is where new tools will emerge.

One such service is Citebase, a citation-ranked search and impact
discovery service: <http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search>. This is a
now a featured service of arXiv and, as you would guess from this, it
mainly covers physics. But Citebase could in principle index OAI-compliant
open archives across all disciplines:
http://opcit.eprints.org/evaluation/Citebase-evaluation/evaluation-report-tr-full.html
It shows what can be achieved if published papers and cited works are all
openly accessible.

Citeseer/ResearchIndex performs a similar function in computer science. Both examples demonstrate the power that might be available if more
content were accessible to these indexing services.

What authors need to do to get the benefit of Bernie Sloan's methods is
instead of posting published papers on personal Web pages, as many do
already, deposit them in OAI institutional archives. For a small amount of
extra effort compared with managing personal Web space, the benefits in
terms of stability and visibility are enormous, and in time authors will
be able to generate a personal citation index with far less effort than
Bernie describes.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

At 17:46 09/02/04 -0500, Bernie Sloan wrote:
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.