The SCI attracted the attention of historians and sociologists of science and served as a catalyst to the field of scientometrics, which uses quantitative methods to analyze the process and development of science. The ISI database has facilitated large-scale quantitative studies of the scientific performance of countries, institutions, fields, departments and individuals. In recent years, such scientometric studies have even contributed to public policy decisions in science. However, it is in assessing the performance of individual scientists, especially in the context of promotion or grant decisions, that the use of citation data is most controversial.
This controversy has arisen for a number of reasons—none more basic perhaps than a common aversion to the impersonal judgment of numbers. Beyond that, however, much of the criticism of citation measures is a response to "quick-and-dirty" citation-counting, a thoughtless practice that reveals little more than an amateur at work and gives citation analysis a ...
