Thomson Scientific Launches Web Citation Index

Hmmmm... ISI must be starting to panic. It isn't clear from this announcement whether they will charge for it.

Thomson Scientific announced the launch of Web Citation Index, a multidisciplinary citation index of scholarly content from institutional and subject-based repositories. Web Citation Index provides users with a 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.

Thomson Scientific content editors select only those Web repositories that are deemed scholarly. The editorial team of subject experts from all scientific disciplines evaluates the resources and handpicks the repositories for inclusion. Repositories must be authoritative, robust, stable, and appropriately formatted.

Web Citation Index adds 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. Web Citation Index will be available early in 1Q 2006.

(Via InfoToday)

Posted by Tom on December 20, 2005