Abstrakt: |
Abstract: Today university rankings and performance rankings (ot en based on JIFs, h-indexes) are believed to be indispensable to assure scientii c “quality”. Most of these performance rankings employ citation data provided by h omson Reuters. TR’s current inl uence on funding decisions, individual careers, institutions, disciplines and countries is immense and ambivalent. h ere is increasing resistance against “impactitis” and “evaluitis”. Usually overseen: Trivial errors in TR’s citation indexes (SCI, SSCI, AHCI) produce severe non-trivial ef ects: h eir victims are authors, institutions, journals with names beyond the ASCIIcode and scholars of humanities and social sciences. Based on the Joshua Lederberg Papers I claim: To overcome severe resistance Eugene Gari eld and Joshua Lederberg had to foster overoptimistic attitudes and to downplay the severe problems connected to global and multidisciplinary citation indexing. h e dii culties to handle dif erent formats of references and footnotes, non- Anglo-American names, and of publications in non-English languages were known to the pioneers of citation indexing. |