The citation graph is one of humankind's most important intellectual achievements / Boing Boing

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-04-15

Summary:

"When researchers write, we don't just describe new findings -- we place them in context by citing the work of others. Citations trace the lineage of ideas, connecting disparate lines of scholarship into a cohesive body of knowledge, and forming the basis of how we know what we know. Today, citations are also a primary source of data. Funders and evaluation bodies use them to appraise scientific impact and decide which ideas are worth funding to support scientific progress. Because of this, data that forms the citation graph should belong to the public. The Initiative for Open Citations was created to achieve this goal.

Back in the 1950s, reference works like Shepard's Citations provided lawyers with tools to reconstruct which relevant cases to cite in the context of a court trial. No such a tool existed at the time for identifying citations in scientific publications. Eugene Garfield -- the pioneer of modern citation analysis and citation indexing -- described the idea of extending this approach to science and engineering as his Eureka moment. Garfield's first experimental Genetics Citation Index, compiled by the newly-formed Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1961, offered a glimpse into what a full citation index could mean for science at large. It was distributed, for free, to 1,000 libraries and scientists in the United States.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century. the Web of Science citation index -- maintained by Thomson Reuters, who acquired ISI in 1992 -- has become the canonical source for scientists, librarians, and funders to search scholarly citations, and for the field of scientometrics, to study the structure and evolution of scientific knowledge. ISI could have turned into a publicly funded initiative, but it started instead as a for-profit effort. In 2016, Thomson Reuters sold its Intellectual Property & Science business to a private-equity fund for $3.55 billion. Its citation index is now owned by Clarivate Analytics...."

Link:

https://boingboing.net/2018/04/14/open-graphs.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.metrics oa.citations oa.data oa.metadata oa.i4oc oa.copyright oa.copyfraud oa.profits oa.publishers oa.wos oa.scholcomm oa.obstacles oa.paywalls oa.history_of oa.growth oa.crowd oa.indexing

Date tagged:

04/15/2018, 13:29

Date published:

04/15/2018, 09:30