Thursday, January 28, 2010

Cited Reference Searches are So Tedious

We routinely do cited reference searches to support candidates for promotion and/or tenure. At times faculty members ask for such searches to see how their totals change from year to year. They are usually interested in their H index which has been discussed in this blog.

I don't mind doing these searches, but they are quite tedious. We use the Web of Science, Scifinder Scholar and Scopus to determine reference counts. These three indexing services cover different publications over inconsistant time frames. We give the professor the benefit of the doubt and report the highest number among the three databases. It takes a long time to accurately perform a cited reference search for a prolific researcher.

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