Institute for Scientific Information

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, and became known as Thomson ISI. It was a part of the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters until 2016, when the IP & Science business was sold, becoming Clarivate Analytics.

ISI offered bibliographic database services. Its specialty: citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield. It maintains citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). All of these are 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 ISI also publishes the annual Journal Citation Reports which list an impact factor for each of the journals that it tracks. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors 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 is maintained by the ISI. The list includes some 1100 arts and humanities journals as well as scientific journals. Listing is based on published selection criteria and is an indicator of journal quality and impact.

ISI publishes Science Watch, a newsletter which identifies every two months one paper published in the previous two years as a "fast breaking paper" in each of 22 broad fields of science, such as Mathematics (including Statistics), Engineering, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. The designations are based on the number of citations and the largest increase from one bimonthly update to the next. Articles about the papers often include comments by the authors.

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