Before being introduced to Web of Knowledge's Web of Science I had started doing a little work for this post. After reading some of the reading this week I was inspired to look at the publication years of the resources Dr. Medina and her colleagues used in in their most recent work:
Sunagawa, S., T.Z. DeSantis, Y.M. Piceno, E.L. Brodie, M.K. DeSalvo, C.R. Voolstra, E. Weil, G.L. Andersen, M. Medina (2009). Bacterial Diversity and White Plague Disease-Associated Community Changes in the Caribbean Coral Montastraea faveolata. ISME J: doi: 10.1038/ismej.2008.131
Below are the age categories used with the corresponding number of sources from this article that fell into each category.
age/year range_______# of articles____% of resources
0-2yrs old (2007-2009) -------15-------------------------22%
3-5yrs old (2004-2006) -------24-------------------------35%
6-10yrs old (2000-2003) ------13-------------------------19%
10yrs old< (1999-____) ------16-------------------------24%
Even though the way I separated the age categories may have something to do with it, I think the results tell a lot. The newest sources weren't as numerous as the 3-5yr. old. Perhaps this illustrates that it takes some time for sources to diffuse and gain momentum before some of them are readily cited. Another possible thought would be that more pertinent research just happened to be performed during in those years compared to the following. I thought it was also interesting that the oldest group of sources accounted for nearly a quarter of the cited sources for this article. Showing the importance of archiving materials; that not all important information is in the newest material and that just because something is over ten years old doesn't make it obsolete/useless. I found that the oldest source within the reference list for this article was published in 1984 by a A. Chao. I tried to look up both this author and Dr. Medina in ISI's Highly Cited but they weren't there. I also tried to look up the article by A. Chao in Web of Science but no results were found. This is possibly because they published in what looks like a Scandinavian statistics journal as the abbreviated title is "Scand J Statist". Nonetheless the Web of Knowledge/Web of Science tools seem very useful and interesting, while needing to be explored further.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I see a lot of you folks musing over all of the journal name abbreviations. They can be a pain. Thankfully there are some great abbreviations listings that we can check. Can anyone name a couple?
ReplyDeleteI had tried to use ISI's Journal Citation Reports for both the sciences and the social sciences but didn't come up with anything. I did find something after a google scholar search. The official title is "Scandinavian Journal of Statistics." However, I think that if I have issues again I might take a peek in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory (we are learning about it in another class and it seems pretty comprehensive).
ReplyDeleteYes, very good. There are also commonly held journal abbreviation guides one by Gale/Cengage and then a tool called CASSI (Chemical Abstracts Service Source Index). There are also some pretty good free web sources. CASSI is much broader than just chemistry. There are also database specific abbreviation guides.
ReplyDelete