Mon, 28 Jul 2003 22:39:05 GMT

In the July 28 SearchDay, Chris Sherman profiles I …. In the July 28 SearchDay, Chris Sherman profiles ISIHighlyCited, the free search engine of highly cited researchers. ISIHighlyCited lets you find highly cited researchers by name, field, institution, and country. When you find a researcher of interest, you can see an ISI-built resume and bibliography of his/her works, but there are no links to full-texts. Sherman compares the service to Google, because ranking by citation is analogous to the Google's method of ranking by incoming links. He also compares it to ResearchIndex, which offers citation analysis of its contents. The difference, of course, is that ResearchIndex also offers open access to the contents themselves. [Open Access News]

I will state now, and for the record, that due to the nature of the data from which this information is generated, it is highly biased toward certain perspectives. Many more people are just as highly cited in a wide variety of areas, but don't show up in this analysis because it lacks consideration for the immense breadth of journals available and interdisciplinary considerations. In short, it needs more journals, and more comparisons to have any meaning except in narrowly defined fields. Or so sayeth my opinion on the matter.