The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by

Eugene Garfield Eugene Eli Garfield (September 16, 1925 – February 26, 2017) was an American linguistics, linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create ''Current Contents'', ''Science Citation Index'' ( ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and

bibliographic database A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like academic journal, journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government an ...

services. Its specialty was

citation index A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century H ...

ing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield.

Services

ISI maintained citation databases covering thousands of

academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...

s, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the

Science Citation Index The Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) is a citation index owned by Clarivate and previously by Thomson Reuters. It was created by the Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information, launched in 1964 as Science Citation Index ( ...

(SCI), as well as the

Social Sciences Citation Index The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is ...

(SSCI) and the

Arts and Humanities Citation Index The Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), also known as Arts and Humanities Search, is a citation index, with abstracting and indexing for more than 1,700 arts and humanities academic journals, and coverage of disciplines that includes s ...

(AHCI). All of these were available via ISI's

Web of Knowledge The Web of Science (WoS; previously known as Web of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that provides (typically via the internet) access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedi ...

database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them. The database provides some measure of the academic impact of the papers indexed in it, and may increase their impact by making them more visible and providing them with a quality label. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that appearing in this database can double the number of citations received by a given paper. The company's main product was ''Current Contents'', which gathers the tables of contents for recent academic journals. The ISI also published the annual ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publication by Clarivate. It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science Core Collection. It provides information about academic journals in the natur ...

'' which list an

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a type of journal ranking. Journals with higher impact factor values are considered more prestigious or important within their field. The Impact Factor of a journa ...

for each of the journals that it tracked. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors continue to play a large but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist's published research record. A list of over 14,000 journals was maintained by the ISI. The list included some 1,100 arts and humanities journals as well as scientific journals. Listings were based on published selection criteria and are an indicator of journal quality and impact. ISI published ''Science Watch'', a newsletter which every two months identified one paper published in the previous two years as a "fast-breaking paper" in each of 22 broad fields of science, such as

Mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

(including

Statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

Engineering Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to Problem solving#Engineering, solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve Systems engineering, s ...

Biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

Chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

, and

Physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

. The designations were based on the number of citations and the largest increase from one bimonthly update to the next. Articles about the papers often included comments by the authors. The ISI also published a list of "ISI Highly Cited Researchers", one of the factors included in the

Academic Ranking of World Universities The ''Academic Ranking of World Universities'' (''ARWU''), also known as the Shanghai Ranking, is one of the annual publications of world university rankings. The league table was originally compiled and issued by Shanghai Jiao Tong Universi ...

published by

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) is a public university in Shanghai, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 98 ...

. This continues under Clarivate.

History

Initially, the company was named Documation. In 1992, ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare, and became known as Thomson ISI. It was a part of the Intellectual Property & Science business of

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational corporation, multinational content-driven technology Conglomerate (company), conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and maintains its headquarters at 1 ...

until 2016, when the IP & Science business was sold, becoming

Clarivate Analytics Clarivate Plc is a British-American publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business and market intelligence, and competitive profiling ...

. Clarivate has since established ISI as part of its Scientific and Academic Research group.

ISI Highly Cited

"ISI Highly Cited" is a database of "highly cited researchers"—scientific researchers whose publications are most often cited in

s over the past decade, published by the Institute for Scientific Information. Inclusion in this list is taken as a measure of the esteem of these academics and is used, for example, by the

. It was founded under ISI and as of 2018 continues under the same name at Clarivate. The methodology for inclusion is to consider papers in the upper first percentile based on citation countsWelcome to Highly Cited Researchers
retrieved July 6, 2014 of all articles indexed in the Scientific Citation Databases and published in a single, fixed year. Papers in the upper first percentile with respect to their year of publication are called highly cited papers. Each paper in the data is assigned to one or more of 21 categories, based on the ISI classification of the journal in which the article was published. The Highly Cited Researchers list is compiled by selecting, in every field, those researchers with the highest number of highly cited papers in a 10-year, rolling time period. The number of highly cited researchers varies from field to field and is determined accordingly to the total number of researchers contributing to the single field. The categories are: The publication list and biographical details supplied by the researchers are freely available online, although general access to the ISI citation database is by subscription.

References

External links

Web of Science website

Highly Cited website
{{Authority control Publishing companies established in 1960 Bibliographic database providers Online databases 1960 establishments in Pennsylvania 1992 mergers and acquisitions Publishing companies disestablished in 1992 1992 disestablishments in Pennsylvania

Services

History

ISI Highly Cited

See also

References

External links