Keith N Hampton

The creators of the Social Science Citation Index, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Science Citation Expanded (collectively known as the Web of Science) are going to take online publishing seriously. Thomson ISI has announced that they will be partnering with NEC to create a “Web Citation Index” that will do autonomous citation indexing of Web-based documents, including pre-prints, proceedings, and “open access” research publications. Steve Lawrence of NEC has argued that articles available for free online have higher citation rates. NEC is behind CiteSeer which has been operating an autonomous citation index for some time. Given CiteSeer’s NEC connection it will likely be related to the new ISI Web Citation Index. In many disciplines citations play a significant role in the tenure process as a measure of influence within a field. The thing about traditional citation indexes is that they only index the most “prestigious” journals. If online publications are cited more frequently (in computer science at least), how will a mainstream online citation index effect academia and the publishing industry?