[WEB4LIB] QUESTION: citing e-publications on resume

[Sloan, Bernie]

Caryn's note reminded me of something I've been meaning to post to
Web4Lib...

A couple of months ago I found myself wondering about the impact the Web has
had on how library practioners, researchers, and educators judge the impact
of their "publications" on the rest of the library and information science
profession.

So, I started playing around in Web of Science, looking for citations to a
couple of my papers. Then I started looking for citations outside of the
usual citation index tools. I started with some general full text journal
databases (Gale's Expanded Academic ASAP and EBSCO's Academic Search Elite)
using my name and/or various paper titles as search arguments. Then I moved
on to several Web search engines (e.g., AltaVista, Google, Northern Light)
using the same search strategies. I pulled the results together and created
the following Web page:

http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/pci.html

While I did this out of personal curiousity, I'm interested to hear from
others who may have done the same thing. What value do you think you derived
from the exercise? Did you find out anything interesting about how your
publications are used?

I'm also curious to hear from folks who haven't done something like this, to
see if you think this is a worthwhile exercise. Would this be a useful way
for librarians, researchers and educators to track the impact of their
published work (both print and Web-based) for the promotion and tenure
process, for example? Also, how do you judge the relative importance of a
citation from a Web resource, rather than a citation from a journal article?
If your paper is cited in a journal article (especially a refereed journal),
that's one thing. But since the quality of Web-based resources varies so
much, do these somehow count for "less"?

Guess I am thinking that, as the Web continues to change the way people both
seek and publish information, how will we treat Web-based literature in
gathering and analyzing citations?

Anyway, I posted something very similar to the above to the jESSE listserv
(LIS educators) in mid-December. In one response, Blaise Cronin of the
Indiana University LIS school forwarded a citation for a 1998 JASIS paper
describing a similar project that he and others did at Indiana. It was a
fascinating read for me, because they grappled with a lot of the same issues
and questions that I had. Turns out that, while there were a lot of
similarities, the process I used was more conservative, e.g., I included
fewer categories of Web citations.  

My project was also different in that I did not rely solely on Web-based
resources, but also integrated citations to and/or from print resources.

Incidentally, Cronin uses the term "invocation" to describe citations on the
Web...I think that's a good descriptive word.

For those interested in reading more on this, consult:

Cronin, B., Snyder, H.W., Rosenbaum, H., Martinson, A., Callahan, E. Invoked
on the Web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(14),
1998, 1319-1328.

I'd like to know what people think of such a "personal citation index".

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
338 Henry Administration Building
506 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL  61801
Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax:     (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies at uillinois.edu