THOMSON ISI

A road map to scientific excellence

The scientific community is awash with information. As the amount of money spent on research increases, the amount of information published about that research follows suit. While a few decades ago scientists struggled to find out what was going on in their field, the modern challenge is to find the important drops in an ocean of information.

Thomson ISI does not seek to add to that information; it publishes maps for scientists to find their way through - information about information, if you like.

From three basic products, the Citations Index, Current Contents, and the Derwent range of patent indices, it has constructed a range of tools. They not only navigate scientists though the oceans, but aim to help them use that information in a way that fits into the day-to-day life of a working scientist, or of a publisher for that matter, rather than just a librarian.

ISI has been going for more than 50 years. It started as the Institute of Scientific Information. Its founder, Dr Eugene Garfield, had an idea for a book that would fit into the lab-coat pocket of a working scientist, and would give an idea of what information was available. Its core products were the Science Citations Index, the Social Science Citations Index and the Arts and Humanities Citations Index, together with Current Contents.

When it began there was not much scientific literature around, but it was clear that, by tracking the papers that were cited by other scientists in their papers, it was possible to gain an insight into what was important. The number of citations does not directly correlate to the importance of a paper, but it is a measure of the impact a paper has made, and is the closest thing to a 'league table' for science.

The tracking of citations also allows scientists to link together research that interests them. It allows users to move backwards and forwards from one paper to similar papers that are either cited by the paper, or that cite a particular paper. At a different level, the analysis of citations has become an important measure for evaluating research and spotting trends. Everyone from grant awarding bodies and government agencies to scientific publishers can use citations to measure the importance of work, or proposals, and even identify important authors.

Since ISI became part of the Thomson publishing empire, it has evolved into 'The Web of Science'. James Pringle, VP of Product development for Thomson ISI, said: 'We are very careful to say that citations are a measure of impact, and not a measure of quality. There is sometimes a relationship between impact and quality, but not always an exact correlation.

'The reason that ISI is important is that we have an editorial team selecting journals on a qualitative and quantitative basis. We take the key and top journals in each field, and help people in a multi-disciplinary field to find the best literature. There is a certain prestige to journals that are included in our database. The best work tends to get published in the best journals, and the best work is most frequently cited. You can think of a citation as a vote by a particular researcher. We don't necessarily know why they cast that vote - it might be to criticise a paper - but it is an affirmation.'

The Web of Science approach has allowed ISI to expand what can be done with the Citation Index, and to link it to other databases, such as the Derwent Patents Index and external databases. The idea is to make a complete research environment, which can move from research papers to the links from the citation index.

There is also a Journal Citation Report, as part of the Web of Science, that is closely watched by publishers looking to evaluate the impact of their journals. Researchers can also work back from an interesting paper to a whole journal, which may lead them to non-intuitive links with other fields of research, and then to other sources of information - or even a journal that they might want to publish in.

Pringle said: 'We have also added in tools that help researchers manage the information through ResearchSoft. What a researcher wants to do is produce papers, report on work, and make grant applications - that is what builds their career. These tools allow you to take bibliographic and other types of data from various places, and put it into your personal database, and output it as bibliographies, footnotes etc., that go right into your grant applications, your paper, or your report. They become a desktop environment in their own right. We have added the ability to go out and do searches of other databases and bring them into your database. Also, if you are including a reference, you only need to put in the first few words of the reference and it will go out and find the precise reference that you want, in the right format.'

Another tool that has recently been added is Biosis, an abstracting and indexing resource for biology and life sciences, which is being integrated into the Web of Science.

Current Contents is a key part of the productivity offering, but Pringle said it is not just an aggregating service. He explained: 'What distinguishes us from aggregators or platform providers who try to bring in a hundred databases at once in a uniform format, is that we try to think through the work-processes of the researcher, how they will use that particular resource, and how it relates to the other resources in the environment. The scientist's work needs to be productive, but it also has to allow for a bit of serendipity and discovery.'

Current Contents has always primarily been an alerting service. With the web version, users set up a list of journals they are interested in and, when they are published, the contents are available. Speed is increasingly of the essence, and this year ISI has made deals with publishers, allowing articles to be pulled into the index within a day of their first publication on the web. Of course, scientists are not news editors, but there will be many scientists thankful for a timely alert the day before an important conference presentation.

Pringle said: 'For a while, we thought scientific disciplines were not very fast moving. But what we are finding is that in some fields, like genomics and nanotechnology, researchers need to keep up to speed on a daily basis. When there is something new, they want to know about it the day before their scientific meeting, their grant application, or if they are filing a patent. If you look at modern communications with listservers and email, people are talking to each other daily around the world. Publishers are being challenged by trying to speed up the publishing process, and so we are being challenged to index faster.'

One of the biggest challenges to fast indexing is, of course, that authors do not always conform to the many competing standards for the presentation of information. Pringle said that one of the advantages of the ResearchSoft tools is that it does produce a standard output format. He has found that open-access publishers are increasingly interested in adopting standards to make sure that their journals are covered by the indexes.

While academic research usually results in a paper published in a journal, commercial research is often most visible through patents. Patents represent information in themselves, but they can also say something about what the organisation behind the patent is up to, and so much interest has arisen in using patent indexes as a tool for getting information about what competitors are doing. Pringle said: 'Patents are used in a variety of ways: looking for new applications; looking for new compounds and processes, for example. Sometimes that is in the scientific literature; most likely that will be found in patents.'

He said companies are becoming more aware of knowledge management and managing their intellectual property portfolio. He said: 'what we are trying to do is to index patents in a value-added way for a company - for example, looking at the phases of drug delivery and looking what is important at each stage; or, for an engineering company, how can you find exactly the right patent information you need, exactly when you need it, for productivity reasons.

'Within Thomson Scientific, we are constantly talking to scientists about their work-flow and what is their end-point and outcome of their work, and how we can get there faster and more efficiently. Different industries and parts of industries have very different workflows, so we need to understand how we can create a path to the information that they need. For example, publishers have very different needs from drug companies.'

One of the reasons that the ISI index has become important is that it does not compete with publishers. There are other electronic formats that offer indexes and fancy search tools, but they are usually either tied to a particular publisher or group of publishers that has bought into a particular platform or service. Pringle said that Thomson has no plans to compete by publishing the actual information.

He said: 'To this point, we have not had a presence in primary publishing. We see our role as helping researchers and practitioners find the right information; it's not our goal to compete with primary publishers. One of the roles we have earned within the publishing world is being a kind of neutral place providing statistics that the whole publishing community can rely on. We take seriously our integrity as a source of unbiased information about the world of publishing.'

He added 'The big focus right now is on making sure that the information products are integrated across the markets that Thomson Scientific is in. On acquisitions, we are looking at how we can add high-quality information products and resources to help us fill in gaps in that picture.'

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