The Future of Citation Analysis

ISI headquarters, in Philadelphia. The building's facade is supposed to evoke moving punch cards, which the company originally used to store citation data. The following page lists the top 10 cited papers from the past two years, 10 years, and of all time.

In the 50 years since Eugene Garfield first proposed it,¹ the Science Citation Index has grown dramatically in size and influence. The database has expanded from 1.4 million citations in 1964 to 550 million today. Its list of source journals has grown from 613 to 15,721. And it has become a key tool for tenure, funding, and award committees.

The move to a Web interface that can analyze a century's worth of literature at the click of a mouse has made the Science Citation Index, now part of Thomson Scientific's Web of Science (WOS), more useful than ever. But the same Web that has given the WOS ...