Subject: Updating the ISI's most cited authors lists

From: Armel Le Bail <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 16:55:46 +0100

Dear Colleagues,

Now almost one year that the ISI's most cited chemists (10858 
cited at least 500 times) and physicists (1120 first) lists are 
freely available at http://www.cristal.org/cit.html (US) or at 
http://fluo.univ-lemans.fr:8001/cit.html (France).

The search engines were asked for ~13000 names/month 
and various partial or full lists were downloaded ~2000/month 
since December 1997, as a mean. Peoples may be interested by 
the knowledge of their own rank or by the rank of colleagues. 
Institutions may use those lists for evaluation. Students may 
decide to make a post-doc according to informations from 
those lists. Etc. For inverse reasons, there could be individuals 
or groups working against those lists publication.

However, the lists gather citations in the range 1981-June 1997. 
They are now outdated.

May I remember the story of the lists availability. Following 
the publication of the 50 most cited chemists by D. Pendleburry 
>from ISI, it was clear that a full list of 10858 names had been
built. After discussions, I bought this full chemists list US$ 1000, 
sharing the cost with a group of 36 colleagues. Then, ISI sent me 
also the 10 first pages of the physicists list, for free. The Web 
access was then tolerated.

There is unfortunately no evidence that ISI will distribute 
updated lists (in spite of asking me for my search engine 
PERL script and of being interested in the number of Web 
access, month after month).

Maybe it is to the Scientific Community to insist for obtaining 
them. They are at the ISI disposal, at the easy click of a button. 
I did not obtained any answer to my recent queries about 
updating. Some of you could have more influence...

Armel Le Bail

PS - A huge correspondence was initiated by these lists 
availability. Some typical comments are below :
> 
> It is a pity that ISI is a for-profit organisation! You did a fine service 
> to the community by making the list available. There should 
> be a way that scientists have access to this information WITHOUT
> paying money for it!

> I really appreciate what you did. This has been a wonderful service to
> the community. 
> I wonder if you have analyzed the data in anyway. More specifically is
> there even a rough relationship between total citations and rank? For
> example is a log-log plot of rank vs total citations linear? If so
> what is the slope? This would allow one to see eg if there is any real
> difference between being ranked 200 vs 400 or 1000 vs 3000 etc etc. 
> Just a thought.

> Do you have available on line on the web a ranked
> list of the 10,000 or so most cited physicists?
> (like your list for chemists). 
> For instance, all physicists with more than 500 citations.
> Many researchers and faculty members would be very, very
> interested in that list. Please let me know how to access it.

> Do you plan tu update the list?

> Great!!! Thanks a lot!! Your stuff is extremely interesting and
> we welcome your activities really gratefully.
> Would you mind to comment about my querries? 
> a) Is the list of citations free of selfcitations? 
> b) Do you involve journals dealing with electrochemistry? 
> I miss some people on your list who are active in this field
> and who enjoy rather frequent quoting.

Etc

All the 1998 Nobel in Chemistry and Physics, but Kohn, 
were inside these lists. Kohn being probably ranked >1120 
in the physicists list (with a chemistry Nobel, and this suggests 
some discrepancies between ISI and the Nobels about what 
are exactly chemistry and physics :-)

Author(s) Name 
              Average citation 
                             Total articles 
                                       Total citations 
                                                   Rank by total 
                                                       citations 
TSUI DC 
                   36.08 
                               184 
                                         6638 
                                                       71 
STORMER HL 
                  54.50 
                                98 
                                         5341 
                                                       133 
LAUGHLIN RB 
                 81.00 
                                46 
                                        3726 
                                                       374 
POPLE JA 
                79.80 
                               176 
                                      14044 
                                                          2

Armel Le Bail - Universite du Maine, Laboratoire des Fluorures, 
CNRS ESA 6010, Av. O. Messiaen, 72085 Le Mans Cedex 9, France 
http://www.cristal.org/