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Publication and Citation Analysis

referring to this type of application as historiography (Garfield, 1979).
A recent variation of this idea is the idea of reference publication year
spectroscopy, see e.g., Marx et al. (2014). Another interesting example
is provided in Liu and Rousseau (2012) where it is shown that cita-
tions to the key article that led Charles K. Kao to the 2009 Nobel
Prize in physics (Kao & Hockham, 1966) reflect the evolution of the
field of fiber optics, including alterations between periods in which
academic research dominated and periods in which technical-
application oriented research dominated.

5.2 CITATION INDICES: GENERALITIES
5.2.1 Definition of a Citation Index

A citation index is a structured database of all reference items in a given
set of documents.
In modern terms a citation index can be described as the result of an
automatic text mining exercise performed in scientific publications.

5.2.2 History of the Science Citation Index

Eugene Garfield is without any doubt the father of modern citation anal-
ysis. In 1960 he founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI,
Philadelphia, PA, USA) and thanks to a research project of US$300,000
(1961 dollars) he published the Genetics Citation Index in 1963, followed
by the first Science Citation Index (SCI). This first SCI described the
publications of the year 1961 in a set of 613 selected journals, leading to a
total of 1.4 million references. In small print, namely 5 point (pt) type let-
ters for author names and cited articles; 3.5 pt type for citing articles (and
recall: the point is about is 0.35 mm), it consisted of five volumes. The
history of the development of this very first SCI is described by Paul
Wouters in his doctoral dissertation (Wouters, 1999).
The SCI was a yearly publication (with the possibility to buy quarterly
editions) which was followed in 1973 by a Social Science Citation Index
(SSCI) (covering the year 1972) and in 1978 by the Arts & Humanities
Citation Index (A&HCI). In 1976, the first volume of the Journal
Citation Reports (JCR) was published, as a volume (volume 9) of the
1975 SCI. The JCR is online available for data beginning in the year
1997. The JCR makes use of the data leading to the citation indices and
shows data referring to journals as a whole. It is discussed in more detail