Philadelphia, PA, USA - London, UK - November 28, 2005 - Today, Thomson Scientific, a business of The Thomson Corporation, announced the
launch of Web Citation Index™—the multidisciplinary citation
index of scholarly content from institutional and subject-based repositories.
Web Citation Index transcends the capabilities of traditional Web search
engines, providing users with a robust citation-based discovery vehicle for preprints,
technical reports, dissertations, proceedings, and other gray literature. It is
the result of a collaborative program between Thomson Scientific, NEC Laboratories
America (NEC), and seven major institutions: Australian National University, California
Institute of Technology, Cornell University, the Max Planck Society, Monash University,
University of Rochester, and NASA Langley.
“We have integrated quality Web content in a consistent way and combined
it with the powerful ISI Web of KnowledgeSM capabilities
to create an entirely new research approach,” said James Pringle, vice
president of development, Thomson Scientific. “The ability to navigate
citation pathways forward and backward in time across multiple content types
allows researchers to combine precise searching with truly serendipitous discovery.”
Thomson Scientific content editors select only those Web repositories deemed
scholarly. This ensures the Web Citation Index delivers only the highest-quality,
most-relevant content.
“We apply rigorous evaluation procedures to the freely available Web
resources included in Web Citation Index,” said Jim Testa, director
of editorial development, Thomson Scientific. Our team, comprised of subject
experts from across all scientific disciplines, evaluates the resources and
hand picks the repositories for inclusion. Repositories must be authoritative,
robust, stable, and appropriately formatted.”
Web Citation Index adds unique Cited Reference Searching to Web-based
documents, allowing researchers to navigate forward, backward and through the
literature to discover related research that would otherwise have been missed.
It does this by incorporating ISI Web of Knowledge capabilities with
a suite of technologies developed by NEC, including "autonomous citation
indexing" tools from the CiteSeer environment. Special software harvests
OAI-compliant metadata from the repositories and combines it with full document
indexes. The software also collects the citations within the document and instantly
links it to the cited document.
The breadth of content available to the researcher within the ISI Web of
Knowledge platform is unmatched: over 22,000 journals, 23 million patents,
12,000 conference proceedings, 5,500 Web sites, 5,000 books, 2 million chemical
structures, and now scholarly Web content, all anchored by Web of Science
and easily searchable through the cross-content search tool.
“Web Citation Index is a next generation research solution that
builds on our 50 year heritage of citation management,” said Keith MacGregor,
executive vice president of Academic and Government Markets, Thomson Scientific.
“No other research tool can match the ISI Web of Knowledge breadth,
depth and consistency of indexing. Now, we have embraced new technology to bring
quality Web-based scholarly content into the solution. As we continue to lead
the way with more exciting developments, we will stick to the fundamentals that
researchers value the most—authenticity and trust.”
