Re: Citation indexing and Re: Ejournal use data, was: Elsevier andcancellations

["Sally Morris" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

I suspect that, while both usage data and citation data are proxies for
what we really want to measure (which is how much an article is actually
read), neither actually maps precisely to reading!  Certainly people may
access an article only to decide that it isn't what they wanted;  or to
glean a single piece of information from it;  even when they print it out,
it may go straight into a file without having been read at the time (or
perhaps ever). It is also said, I suspect with some truth, that authors do
not exclusively cite articles which they themselves have actually read
(certainly the perpetuation of erroneous citations would suggest that they
are sometimes simply lifted from another author's list of citations!)

Sally Morris

-----Original Message-----
From: Hunger99@aol.com <Hunger99@aol.com>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Date: 21 August 1999 04:48
Subject: Citation indexing and Re: Ejournal use data, was: Elsevier
andcancellations


>Didn't Garfield pioneer this area by looking at citation indexing?
>Doesn't Science Citation Indexing still put out numbers on what journals
>and what articles have the most impact in a field?  Are these not better,
>more direct, measures than how often a journal is accessed?  It would
>appear that accessing may be related to the impact of a journal or
>article, but what we would like to know for understanding progress and
>development in a field is impact, or some such measure. Aren't citation
>measures available to librarians for free from SCI?  And SSCi? dh
>