"Needless to Say My Proposal Was Turned Down": The Early Days of Commercial Citation Indexing, an "Error-making" (Popper) Activity and Its Repercussions Till Today

Abstract

Today university rankings and performance rankings (ot en based on JIFs, h-indexes) are believed to be indispensable to assure scientii c "quality". Most of these performance rankings employ citation data provided by h omson Reuters. TR's current inl uence on funding decisions, individual careers, institutions, disciplines and countries is immense and ambivalent. h ere is increasing resistance against "impactitis" and "evaluitis". Usually overseen: Trivial errors in TR's citation indexes (SCI, SSCI, AHCI) pr oduce sev er e non-tri vial ef ects: h eir victims are authors, i n s t i t u t i o n s , journals with n a m e s beyond t he ASCIIcode and scholars of humanities and social sciences. Based o n t he Joshua Lederberg Papers I claim: To overcome severe resistance Eugene Gari eld and Joshua Lederberg had to foster overoptimistic attitudes and to downplay the severe problems connected to global a n d m u ltidisciplinary citation indexing. h e dii culties to handle dif erent formats of references and footnotes, non-Anglo-American names, and of publications in non-English languages were known to the pioneers of citation indexing.