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 linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create ''Current Contents'', ''Science Citation Index'' (SCI), ''Journ ...

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

in 1956. ISI offered

scientometric Scientometrics is the field of study which concerns itself with measuring and analysing scholarly literature. Scientometrics is a sub-field of informetrics. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academi ...

and

bibliographic database A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, p ...

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 Hebr ...

ing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield.

Services

ISI maintained citation databases covering thousands of

academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...

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

Science Citation Index The Science Citation Index Expanded – previously entitled Science Citation Index – is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and ...

(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 & Humanities Citation Index'' (A&HCI), also known as ''Arts & Humanities Search'', is a citation index, with abstracting and indexing for more than 1,700 arts and humanities journals, and coverage of disciplines that includes social an ...

(AHCI). All of these were 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. 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 publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...

'' which list an

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...

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 an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

(including

Statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

Engineering Engineering is the use of scientific method, scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad rang ...

Biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

Chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

, and

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its 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 which r ...

. 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 University ...

published by

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU; ) is a public research university in Shanghai, China. The university is funded by the Ministry of Education of China. The university was established on April 8, 1896 as Nanyang Public School (南洋� ...

. 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 media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corpora ...

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 / market intelligence, and competitive profiling for p ...

. In February 2018, Clarivate announced it will re-establish ISI as part of its Scientific and Academic Research group. It exists as a group within Clarivate as of November 2018.

ISI Highly Cited

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

cited A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of ...

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 as follows: 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