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104 Becoming Metric-Wise

in the next chapter. Since 1988, the citation indices became available on
CD-ROM and since 1997 it became possible to consult these citation
indices via the Internet in the Web of Science (WoS). The year 2009 saw
the inclusion in the WoS of the Conference Proceedings Citation Index
Science (CPCI-S) and the Conference Proceedings Citation Index Social
Science & Humanities (CPCI-SSH). More than 20,000 journals are cov-
ered, but not all are described in the JCR. In the year 2011 Thomson
Reuters (the then owner of the WoS) launched a Book Citation Index
(BCI) (Adams & Testa, 2011). By including books, Thomson Reuters
hoped to provide a better coverage of the social sciences and the
humanities. In 2015 Thomson Reuters launched the Emerging Sources
Citation Index (ESCI), extending the set of publications in the WoS to
include more publications of regional importance and in emerging sci-
entific fields. The company claims that ESCI will also make content
important to funders, key opinion leaders, and evaluators visible in the
WoS even if it has not yet impacted an international audience. ESCI
journals do not receive an impact factor, but are evaluated regularly and
those qualified will be transferred to the WoS and hence, will receive an
impact factor.
The SCI has been expanded retrospectively and goes back nowadays
to the beginning of the 20th century (existing since 2005). The subdata-
base Century of Science describes the period 1900 1944, while also the
period 1945 1960 has been included retrospectively.
The Institute of Scientific Information was bought in 1992 by
Thomson Scientific & Healthcare, and became known as Thomson ISI.
Thomson Scientific itself became part of the Thomson Reuters
Corporation. In 2016 Thomson Reuters sold its Intellectual Property &
Science Business, which included the WoS, to Onex and Baring Asia. In
this way the WoS and several other databases such as InCites and the
Derwent World Patents Index became part of Clarivate Analytics.
More information about the use of the WoS is provided in
Section 5.15.

5.2.3 Competitors for Thomson Reuters

Until the year 2004, ISI and later Thomson Reuters held a monopoly
position of global citation indices (there were only a few small or local
initiatives). However, in 2004 the situation changed when Elsevier
launched Scopus. Nowadays Scopus provides a complete description of