Citation Indexes: Uses and Misuses

The Web of Science citation indexes were originally intended to serve as research aids, to provide easy-to-use bibliographic aids for authors, help authors identify colleagues who have cited their work, and assist librarians in making selections among journals. But they were soon carried by the tidal waves of scientism and data-ism, first in business management and governance, and then also in scholarly research, to near-monopolistic control of the business of journals evaluation in the United States (though increasingly challenged in some areas by the more recent but similar Scopus citation indexes). With that dominance, earlier tentative generalizations based on limited research gradually became more and more rigidified “laws” that have been strictly enforced: that quality can be scientifically measured by the number of articles that cite the article or a particular journal, and, by extension, that the importance and contribution of a scholar’s article, like that of a journal, can be determined by its “impact factor” measured by counting the number of articles citing it. Those “laws” came to be applied first to the natural sciences, extended to the social sciences, and finally also to major spheres of the arts and humanities. Today, they have come to dominate the entire continuum of disciplines and fields ranging from the most universalist of the natural sciences, in which truths may be established by reproducible experiments, to the more particularist social sciences, and still more particularist arts and humanities, in which theories, even facts, are far more contested and tentative. As we move across the spectrum from the more universalist end of natural sciences toward the more particularist end of the social sciences and arts and humanities, such methods have tended to violate ever more the fundamental nature and realities of scholarly research. However, once entrenched, the citation indexes business has shown the same tendencies as any monopolistic entity toward resisting change and transparency. Where those tendencies have been adopted by a centralized government for bureaucratized control, as in China, the misuses and abuses of citation indexes have been further magnified. This article ends by calling for developing more substantive, genuinely peer-review-based methods of evaluation; for relying more on alternative nonprofit bibliographic and data services; and for greater inclusivity, especially with regard to scholarship in languages other than English.