Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

April 2007

Title: in-cites
Publisher: Thomson Science Research Services Group
URL: http://in-cites.com
Cost: free
Tested: April 8-17, 2007

The Context

The Web site of in-cites is one of those rare cases when a source does not have competition to measure up against. The in-cites site is a unique open access subset of the subscription-based Essential Science Indicators site of Thomson ISI.  Certainly, there is statistical information about many aspects of scientific and research activities at the sites of international agencies, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental agencies, and of national academies and boards involved in supporting, coordinating, assessing  and reporting about scientific productivity, but these are too widely scattered for ready reference purposes.  

For example, the very good Web site of the National Science Foundation, especially its Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS), has substantial historical back-files of surveys, reports and tables, and a series of databases providing statistics about scientific research activities, but mostly at an aggregated level and, understandably, with a U.S. focus with occasional comparative data about the worldwide context.

Quite tellingly, when it comes to the details of scientific publications in the Science & Engineering Indicators section, within the chapter on Academic Research and Development, it uses data aggregated from or based on the ISI Citation Indexes as explained here.

The Content

In-cites is a potpourri of research-related information in the form of statistics, top lists of scientific journals, scientists and researchers, R&D institutions and of research achievements of countries in various disciplines. This is the type of ready reference information that is often needed but hard to find, simply because beyond  global data of research budgets, analytic level data is not available, let alone from a single open access source.

Beyond the most important, just-the-facts-ma'am type of ready reference information,  in-cites offers other types of information. I'll discuss them first, then I'll come back to the most important components—the bibliometric and scientometric data.

In-cites has interviews with the scientists, authors and leading personalities of research institutions whose papers and journals have had the highest impact (in light of their citedness), and/or represent hot topics because of their high citedness rate in the year of their publication. (Usually, research papers get most often cited in the third year after the year of publication. Thus a high number of citations shortly after the publication of the paper implies that it is a well-researched and well-written paper on a topic of current interest). These interviews,  available from 2001, provide useful background and serve the same purpose as the Citation Classics Commentary series established and published by Eugene Garfield for nearly 20 years, all of them available and searchable on Garfield's own site hosted by University of Pennsylvania. Just as Thomson Gale provides links to the historical predecessors of the review columns of three of my learned colleagues and myself and to the nearly 500 excellent database and book reviews by  Jim Rettig, Thomson Science should link to the Citation Classic Commentaries. There is a link to a Current Classics site, but it is a "listing of papers (one in each field) having the greatest absolute increase in cumulative citations from the previous bimonthly period to now."

From the perspective of ready reference services, the following sections are the most useful: Top 10, Hot Papers,  Analysis, Quick Science,  and SCI-BYTES. At a different base URL, there is another, stand-alone and open access resource called Special Topics, created from the Essential Science Indicators database, which I will review later.

Top10 and Hot Papers sections

This section is researcher oriented. From 2003 on, it identifies the 10 most-cited authors in 22 broad subject categories, ranging from Agricultural Science to Space Science. The top-list is updated six times a year and covers 10 years and x number of months – depending on the date of the search. For ready reference purposes, a single aggregated list of the top 100 researchers would be more convenient. There is a separate option, the Hot Papers sections  which could satisfy  one's need for information about the recently (past two years) published  and very  recently (past 2 months) cited top three papers in the in each of the 22 subject categories.  Although it is not listed on the crowded main menu page, there  is a Super Hot Papers subsection listing the 103 red-hot papers across the science subject fields based on the above mentioned criteria.

Analysis Section

This section  has wider scope, offering top lists by authors, institutions, countries, journals (the top five in each categories), identifies the most cited and the hottest paper, and provides the Baselines for the broad subject category and the yearly citation rates for the past 11 years.

These latter two tables are  appealingly compact and highly informative – once you understand the exact meanings of the numbers. To help in this, there is an excellent help file illustrating and explaining the percentile breakdowns and the basis for the citation rates. It needs to be corrected, however, in one aspect. It says that "In the Chemistry portion of the table, a value of 66, for instance, in the 0.01% column for 1998 indicates that the top 0.01% of papers in chemistry journals in that year have since been cited a minimum of 66 times". It is the cell at the intersection of the 0.01% row for the 1998 column. In the most recent analyses,  there are now six percentile breakdowns (not four), and the yearly citation rates tables list the values for the subject field being selected, not for all the subject field. The help file should reflect these. These are minor issues, but such contradictions may throw off the track a timid user. The Analysis section is available from 2003 on.

Quick Science and SCI-BYTES sections

The Quick Science Section provides weekly snapshots from 2003 on about the aggregated ranking position of a select journal, institution or country, or identifies the top paper in a journal, or of an institution within a disciplinary area, occasionally enhanced by a graph representing the yearly citedness scores (citation counts)  for the paper or the institution or country over the past 10 or 11 years. This is superb, and not only for users wanting instant gratification. For each entry there is an additional link to the more detailed profile provided by SCI-BYTES.

For example, one of the March, 2007 snapshots is about Taiwan, and there is a link to the SCI-BYTES table, which shows the contribution of authors (affiliated with a Taiwanese institution) to the (primarily) English-language periodical literature of the 21 broad subject areas. The special, multidisciplinary category is not used here. The table also shows the position of the country in the worldwide league in the disciplines. A short and competent narrative analysis points out the strength and weakness of Taiwan in this example.

As with every number, using common sense in the interpretation comes in handy. Taiwan's weakest point in scholarly publications seems to be Business and Economics, but as far as I know it has a stable and steadily developing economy, so  maybe its focus is on doing business rather than writing about it. The only weakness of these two sections is that you never know when your country, journal or institute of interest will get its turn.

While Quick Science offers its snapshots from 2003 onward, SCI-BYTES coverage starts in 2000, so by all means go also to that section directly, as there may be citational profiles of a discipline, a journal or a country of interest to you.

The Software

The software is just not on par with the content. It probably was created a long time ago as a prototype to test the functionality of and interest for such a service. The interface reminds me of both in its layout and use of font types and colors of birthday party notes printed on a very discounted inkjet printer with depleted color toners,   nailed to picket fences and trees in the neighborhood.

It did not help that during the years new modules were added to in-cites.com, and the interface became very crowded and convoluted. The top menu and side menu, as well the entire homepage, are dominated by buttons and labels of the sections for interviews with  highly cited researchers, productive authors, editors of prestigious journals and representatives of widely acknowledged research institutes. These are useful components of in-cite.com but their sign posts and homepage excerpts don't leave much room for steering the users to the many precious details of citational evidences that are the foundations of everything on this site.

The buttons and labels to the sidebar on the left for the non-interview sections (apparently added later) are like sign posts at a carnival, set up for celebrating a moveable feast on the weekend in a very small town. This not only makes the page (and by association, the content) cheap, but also makes the  navigation confusing. There is an overview menu of all interviews, but it does not help that the many citational country profiles and ranking tables are listed under interviews when they are not interviews, and there is none related to them. (There are short, informative essays for some of the country-level rank lists, but these are  editorial commentaries not interviews.).

There is an alphabetical index to all the editorial content but it is at the very bottom of one or more of the menu pages in the blindest spot on the screen –if you scroll down to the second screen of the page. Here is the link in case you can't find it even with the hints provided in the previous sentence: http://in-cites.com/features/a-f.html.

It is very frustrating that some of the information-rich tables are not optimized for the typical default print margins, and don't print the rightmost columns, or print only part of them. This is true for all of the Analysis tables, which span five pages for each of the 22 subject categories and affects all seven tables in each of them, so this is not a small matter.

The irony is that all the tables would fit on a regular page with even 1.25" margins if the columns for names of researchers, institutions,  journals and countries were narrowed by 25%, as well as the columns for citations/per paper.  

A six-digit citation count would be nonsense for the average numbers (including Lowry's most-cited paper) — even if you grew up on the many grossly inflated citation counts reported by Google Scholar, which often turn out to be phantom citations, matching at best on  the middle initial of one of  the authors as I illustrated earlier in this presentation at the plenary session of the UKSG conference, and in this article in Online Information Review.

This precious and in many regards unique –if selective– open access content can be very important for reference librarians and researchers who don't have access to the subscription-based Essential Science Indicators database. It deserves a far better navigation tool to make sure that it can be used as a ready reference resource, otherwise the targeted users will just bypass it.

— Péter Jacsó