Discusses "impact factor," a measure of journal impact defined by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and available in Journal Citation Reports. Argues that "impact factor" is misnamed and misused, suggesting an alternative name and interpretation of the measure, and proposes two new measures to assess the impact of…

Describes a study that examined articles in the "Journal of the American Society for Information Science" from 1972 to 1974 to determine the relationship between funding and other variables for publications in information science. Other variables examined included the subject of the article, institutional affiliation of authors, and…

Assess the ways in which citation searching of scholarly print journals is and is not analogous to backlink searching of scholarly e-journal articles on the Web, and identifies problems and issues related to conducting and interpreting such searches. Findings call into question the legitimacy of using backlink searches to evaluate the scholarly…

A citation analysis was conducted to assess the impact of electronic journals on scholarly communities and their research. The article discusses data collection methods (the Institute of Scientific Information's indexes, searchable via DIALOG), explains searches done on particular record fields, and identifies the most frequently cited electronic…

Describes a study that investigated semantic relationships between citing and cited documents for a sample of document pairs in three journals in library and information science. Highlights include comparisons of Library of Congress classification numbers and subject descriptors; implications for collection development and relevance; and…