• When Eugene Garfield conceived citation indexing, in 1953 and 1955, he had several principles and a utopia of scientific communication in mind…

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The principles

• 1. Science is communication

• “It is often difficult to distinguish between man’s actual knowledge and the ability to communicate that knowledge”.

E. Garfield (1953 dissertation outline manuscript).

• Comment: Garfield conceives scientific literature as a mirror representation of science. One could take some distance from this view, and citation indexing would still have meaning!

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The principles

2. Validation of knowledge is the primary objetive of scientific information systems.

• E. Garfield (Science, 1955). “Even if there were no other use for a citation indexing than that of minimizing the citation of poor data, the index would be well worth the effort required to compile it”.

• This implies a process of selection in the communication among scientists.

The principles

• 3. Fraud in scientific data ought to be eliminated...

• “... I propose a bibliographic system for science literature that can eliminate the uncritical citation of fraudulent, incomplete or obsolete data...” (Garfield, 1955)

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Utopia

• 1. The utopia of scientific information should be multi-lingual and truly international:

• “…this plan would hope to:… (2) facilitate polyglot indexes to the world’s scientific literature; (3) permit indexes in any one language to the world’s scientific literature; (4) help standardize indexes to the individual scientific journals, in the language of the reader;…”

• E. Garfield (1953).

• 2. Different regions of the world should have their own indexes:

• “Se podría tener una imagen más amplia y multidimensional de la investigación en América Latina y el Caribe si hubiera una base de datos que incluyera esas revistas. Sin embargo, esa base no existe todavía, aunque he insistido desde hace años en que la creación de un Índice Científico de Citación Latinoamericano (un SCI para América Latina) sería una labor interesante”.

• Garfield 1995.• “The creation of a Latin American Scientific Index would

be an interesting job”.

Utopia

• 3. In his preface to Garfield’s book, his friend, the great sociologist of science Robert K Merton completes the utopia:

• “... the more widely scientists make their intellectual property freely available to others, the more securely it becomes identified as their property. For science is public not private knowledge.”

• Open access becomes part of the utopia.

Utopia

• 4. Indexes should recognize each other and integrate:

• “this plan would hope to... Provide a check on the coverage of individual articles and journals by various abstracting and indexing services;”

• Garfield 1953.

But what happened with utopia?

International access has improved, but:

• language barriers are an issue in the sciences.

• The federation of regional indexes is far from complete.

• Open access remains utopia for scientists from many countries.Watch the figures:

The evolution that triggered the open The evolution that triggered the open access movement worldwideaccess movement worldwide

Source: T.J. Walker, Florida Entomologist Society, 1996, 1998.

While price indexes and book prices grew 300%, the price of a basket of journals grew 1800 %!

Important fractions of leading LA scientists report problems in database access.

¿Ha tenido algún problema significativo de acceso a bases de datos?

23%

74%67%

33%

91%

62%

77%

26%33%

67%

9%

38%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Argentina Chile Colombia México Brasil Total

NO

SI

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Indexing, web-portals and visibility

• A recent survey of 92 scientific journals we have completed in 6 countries of Latin America:

– Shows that isolated journals have no visibility, even if they have their own page.

– Journals entering Scielo improve visibility, even in ISI.

– Multiple Internet gateways are becoming the rule:

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Number of Internet portals where 92 sci open access Number of Internet portals where 92 sci open access journals are presentjournals are present

• The most frequentThe most frequent::• The journal’s own siteThe journal’s own site

• Institutional siteInstitutional site (Universi (Universityty, , AcademAcademy, Associationy, Association) )

• Scielo Scielo

• Bioline InternationalBioline International

• Directory of Open Access Directory of Open Access Journals Journals

• Red ALyC Red ALyC

• Imbiomed Imbiomed

• CRICYT-CONICETCRICYT-CONICETMore than 50% are in multiple Internet sites

Número de portales de revistas de acceso abierto en que están inscritas las revistas

46%

34%

15%

4%

1%

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

50%

1 2 3 4 6

Número de portales

Nú

mer

o d

e re

vist

as

Major indexing services reporting citations:

ISI-Thomson: 9.770 - active peer-reviewed journals. (http://scientific.thomson.com) since 1900.

• Scielo: 361 - active peer-reviewed journals. (http://www.scielo.org)• PsycINFO: 2.216 - 98% active peer-reviewed journals.

(http://www.apa.org/psycinfo/about/covlist.ht)• MEDLINE: 5.164 – active peer-reviewed journals

(http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/lji.html)• Elsevier Scopus: 14,200 through licensing, including 531 open access

in 2006; (21.074) - active peer-reviewed journals (http://info.scopus.com/detail/what/) . Links to Scirus but, for quality, selects documents with 10 or more citations.

• Elsevier Science Direct: 2.717 – active peer-reviewed journals (http://www.sciencedirect.com/) uses Scopus. Includes accepted manuscripts.

(“even Google scholar offers a version” (of citation tracking) Quint, 2006.)

Only ISI and Scielo calculate Impact Factors.

Latin American science in the new scenario of scientific information

The citation culture has had a profound impact in Latin American science:

I. A division of scientific communities in two sub-communities in each field and country.

II. Under-representation in citation indexes.

I. A divide in LA scientific communities

– One sub-community is committed almost exclusively to ISI journal publication (21/61 in our survey of the most cited in 6 countires of Latin America);

– the other is oriented towards locally relevant research topics, local audiences, impact on local public policies and local industries (21/61).

– A fraction of scientists attempts to do both, with a loss of productivity, but not necessarily of scientific impact (19/61).

II. Sub-representation?

• Language distribution of journals in Scopus, with respect to Ulrich’s core:

– English, French, Chinese, Dutch and Russian are over-represented.

– German, Spanish and Italian are under-represented.

(Scimago Group, 2006).

Besides: how complete is Ulrich’s?

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Latin American journals in Ulrich

740 active refereed journals in 10 countries of Latin America appear in Ulrich’s.

• 361 in Scielo:3/ 176 Brazilian journals in Scielo are not in Ulrich.3/26 Argentinian.2/36 Chilean. 2/30 Colombian. All Cuban (20), Venezuelian (28) and Spanish (31) in Scielo are in

Ulrich’s.Ulrich’s coverage has improved significantly in the past 2 years.

- 36 LA journals are in ISI. (http://scientific.thomson.com/mjl/)

- 322 are in Scopus. • (http://info.scopus.com/detail/what/).

A proposal

Long term trends and questions related to sci communication

• Trends:• a) The need for new local knowledge is increasing.• b) Industrial countries progressively need more

knowledge coming from developing countries.• c) Social sciences in developing countries are

going through a process of balkanization.• Question:• d) Is Bradford’s law (significant scientific results

are published in a small fraction of scientific journals) stronger or weaker today? (significant from whose perspective?).

What do we want from a new scenario?

• Principles:– Faithful representation of science– Validation and selection– Minimization of fraudulent, incomplete and

obsolete data.

• Utopian dreams:– Polyglot indexing.– Universal access for all sci communities.– Open access.

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Six conceivable scenarios for the future of indexing

    I.     Vegetative prolongation of the present scenario.

   II.     Babel I: each country implements national citation and citation count systems in local language.

III.     Babel II: citation systems by language. No interconnection.

  IV.    A centralized system around ISI Thompson (or Scopus). All language systems and national indexation services become integrated, after a selection process, into ISI’s different categories.

   V.    Cold war confrontation between ISI and Scopus. Scopus would start publishing indicators, and a few regional or disciplinary systems would survive with the help of national or international subsidies.

  VI.     An interconnected federated network of all or most language or disciplinary oriented citation indexing systems.

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Cold war or Federated network?

• Only two of these scenarios are actually highly likely to occur:– Cold war: Scopus vs. ISI, which eventually

could end up in a monopoly by one of them.– A federated network. Through progressive

agreements, the different systems would join in a decentralized network, much like telecommunication networks operate.

A federated network of indexing systems

• Each system would remain economically independent.• All the technology, software, license contract minutes, and all

the economics has been designed.• Quality level and criteria, as well as user language would be

selected for information retrieval, citation tracking, indicator calculations and other functions.

• Ideally, one would wish full free access (Merton’s scientific ethos calls for this), but perhaps this exceeds the laws of utopian thinking.

• Systems would still compete through group and individual pricing at the gateways. Internal transfer pricing would be the object of agreements.

What would happen with principles?

• 1. Faithful representation: The “ability to communicate that knowledge” would be in the hands of a much larger community.

• Validation and selection: available on menu, with a multidimensional criterion.

• Minimization of fraud, etc.: Wider scientific communities (including those of developing countries and other disciplines) would permanently be validating research.

And what about the utopian agenda?

• Polyglot indexing: enabled and facilitated through collaboration.

• Universal access for scientists from all communities: decentralization has the potential to increase scientists access.

• Open access (for users): open access journals would be in a special macro-collection (similar to the open access directory, but with citation indexing). Paying systems would either subsidize them with a portion of their extra earnings induced by integration, or lowering their rates accordingly.

• Integration: that is actually the key of federated networking of citation index systems.

Once again: cold war or federated network?

• Neither one is impossible, as illustrated by the following quote from an interview by Quint (2006) to Pringle, ISI-Thomson CEO:

– “I asked Pringle if he had considered whether Thomson ISI might license its data to other outlets, such as Elsevier Scopus. He said: “In fact, that was a path I probably would have recommended a year ago, but over the past year I’ve been very impressed with the Web of Science performance...”

– “On the other hand, we continue to look at whether relationships make sense for us and our customers. We have no preconceived notions.”

Three embarassing questions and one proposal

• The questions:

1. Can Scielo, Pascal and other systems do anything to tilt the cold-war/federated-network balance?

2. Can scientists and their academies?

3. Can Unesco, European, Asian and developing country governments?

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Citation indexing systems and the future of scientific publications in

Latin America Clemente Forero-PinedaCatalina Estrada-Mejía

School of ManagementUniversidad de los Andes

Bogotá Colombiacfp@adm.uniandes.edu.co

End