SENSE AND NONSENSE OF SCIENCE CITATION ANALYSES - COMMENTS ON THE MONOPOLY POSITION OF ISI AND CITATION INACCURACIES - RISKS OF POSSIBLE MISUSE AND BIASED CITATION AND IMPACT DATA

Journal editors and publishers, authors of scientific papers, research directors, university and research council administrators, and even g overnment officials increasingly make use of so-called 'Impact Factors ' to evaluate the quality of journals, authors and research groups. Th ese figures are used in decision-making processes about (dis)continuat ion of journal subscriptions, selection of journals for submission of papers, ranking of authors and groups of authors, and even for increas e and decrease of funding to research groups. All data are based on th e counting of citations of the scientific papers of authors. Very few users appear to realize that these figures can be seriously wrong, bia sed and even manipulated, as a result of: (i) citation habits for auth ors in different fields, (ii) selectivity in (non)citations by authors , (iii) errors made by authors in citation lists at the end of papers, (iv) errors made by ISI in entering publications and citations in dat abases, and in classifying citations and accrediting them to journals and authors, and (v) incomplete and misleading impact figures publishe d by ISI. Although quite a few bonafide and competent analysts and org anisations specialized in citation analyses exist, the incompetence of many analysts, when using crude ISI data in discussing rankings of jo urnal and/or authors, is an additional factor that makes such analyses often unreliable. This paper reviews some of the current practices in publications and citations for (bio)chemists and (bio)chemistry journ als; critical comments are made with regard to the use and consequence s of erroneous and incomplete or too detailed data. A few recent examp les are given of the use and misuse of such data, to illustrate and ev aluate the (non)sense of current practice.