Institute for Scientific Information
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The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992 and was known as Thomson ISI and now merely Thomson Scientific.
ISI offers bibliographic database services. Its speciality is citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield. It maintains a citation database covering thousands of academic journals (a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing services) the Science Citation Index (SCI), the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), all of which are available via ISI's Web of Knowledge database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them.
ISI also publishes an annual Journal Citation Report which lists an impact factor for each of the journals that it tracks. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors play a huge but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist's published research record.
[edit] See also
- GetCITED - an attempt to replicate Web of Science
- List of academic journal search engines
- Impact factor
