Re: Institutional affiliation of authors

[bosire onyancha <b_onyancha@yahoo.com>]

Dear Inna,

It is a well known fact that the Thomson Scientific's science 
indicators are the most extensively used tools for research 
evaluation and as such all we can do is to appreciate the 
enormous work that the company has done in compiling such huge 
amounts of data. Many thanks should also go to the founder of the 
ISI for mooting an idea of the indexes and other tools of 
evaluation, i.e. Garfield.

However, just as you mentioned, it is a bit confusing. I am not 
sure whether I am just unable to obtain the institutional 
affiliation of a given author in a given record or whether it is 
simply not possible. To clarify my point, let us assume that one 
would want to categorize authors as either domestic or foreign. 
The only possible way to do so is by looking at both the authors' 
and institutional fields (if we use the science indicators). But 
that is where the problem is: the arrangement of authors and 
institutions is not the same (i.e. do not correlate). Sometimes, 
as I mentioned in my earlier message, the institutions are fewer 
than the number of authors.

May be I am wrong, and I would like someone to correct me on 
that.

Otherwise, thanks for your advise. I may want to contact Thomson 
Scientific, although I am sure that some of its employees are on 
this ListServe.

Regards
Bosire Onyancha
______________________

Inna Ilinskaya <ilinskay@fiu.edu> wrote:

This is quite confusing. I have never noticed that records are so weird, 
probably because I did not need to identify the institutional affiliation of 
the author.

Did you try to contact Thomson Scientific customer support? If they do not know 
how to sort things out, I wonder who would know.

You can find their contact information at:
http://scientific.thomson.com/custserv/

Inna Ilinskaya
ilinskay@fiu.edu
Electronic Information Services Librarian
Interim Engineering Librarian
Green Library -- GL 232B
Florida International University
Miami, FL 33199