WoW! Wouter over het Web

Currently I am working on a citation analysis job. Reviewing quite a number of researchers and an even larger list of publications. Our trick is that we make a comparison of the citation data extracted from Web of Science with the Baselines found in the Essential Indicators (ESI). Both are databases from Thomson Scientific. Not too much work you might think. Two databases, one is derived from the other, made by the same company.
Well, in theory no sweat.
When you try to work out one or two articles you can run already into some little annoyances, when you one to look-up thousands of journals ISI can drive you mad.
Once you have established that researcher x has published an article in the American Heart Journal and found y citations. The next step is that you look up this journal in ESI. You have to establish in which field the journal is categorized according to ESI. In ESI you have to look this up using the journal abbreviations, quite simple the abbreviation of this journal is AMER Heart J. Slightly odd since this journal is abbreviated in the Journal Citation Report as the AM Heart J. But a another article in the American Journal of Critical Care should be abbreviated as AMER j crit care in ESI. Similar happens with Advances in Advances in Atmospheric Science and Advances in Ecological research. In the first instance you should abbreviate Advances as Adv and in the second instance as Advan. These are mere two examples, doing this manually you run in hundreds of examples.
Ok, be smart don't do it manually. Let's automate. At In-Cites there is a list with all journal categories available. Really nice of Thomson to list a really handy help tool outside the product itself (Yes there is a help file with journal abbreviations available in ESI, but you can't search that list directly, you have to browse, and heck they miss the journal categories in that help file altogether)
Working with the list at In-Cites isn’t a real joy either. Have for instance a look at Abacus, that journal is listed twice at the In-Cites list. Not too much of a problem you might think. But when you want to use a database to make lookups of journal categories and baseline data a bit less labour intensive the best way is to use ISSN to couple the various tables.
Sounds simple. Use the table with all journal categories from In-Cites and match that on the full title against the Journal Masterlist of ISI where they have the ISSN listed as well. Soon you find out that the AUTRALIAN JOURNAL OF GRAPE AND WINE RESEARCH from In cites doesn't match with the AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF GRAPE AND WINE RESEARCH from the Masterlist because a stupid spelling error. Or the A N Z JOURNAL OF SURGERY doesn't match with the ANZ JOURNAL OF SURGERY. From the 12485 journals listed at In-cites I was only able to match 8346 journals on journal name. That leaves me some 4000 to match manually, or find out what went wrong.
What I really wonder is, how is it possible that all these little name variations, journal abbreviations differences and other mismatches are possible for a suit of products from a company that breathes databases. A company that has only data in its veins, that sweats information. A company that claims knowledge.
We all rely heavily on their products.

Labels: English, ESI, Essential Science Indicators, In-Cites, ISI, Thomson Scientific, Web of Science, WoS