As Garfield pointed out, traditional indexing has serious limits, and adding more indexers would not be a panacea. ‘Were an army of indexers available, it is still doubtful that the proper subject indexing could be made.’ He added that ‘by using authors’ references in compiling the citation index, we are in reality utilizing an army of indexers, for every time an author makes a reference, he is in effect indexing that work from his point of view’. Technology certainly improved the efficiency of some parts of human indexing, but the ever increasing indexing quotas of indexers, often makes the intellectual process look like an assembly line operation resulting in declining quality. Current developments validate his vision big time....I am already looking forward to what shall I write about in 2015 which will be not only [Garfield's] 90th birthday but also the 50th anniversary of his conference paper in which he pondered about the feasibility of automating citation indexing. This idea recently has become one of the hot issues in information science. Unfortunately, G-S [Google Scholar] gives a bad name to autonomous citation indexing. It shows lack of competence, and understanding of basic issues of citation indexing. G-S fails even in implementing the most basic Boolean OR operation correctly (Figure 9). Riding on the waves of the regular Google software which is great for processing the unstructured heap of billions of Web pages, G-S cannot handle even the meticulously tagged, metadata-enriched few million journal articles graciously offered to it by many publishers for free. Some bright minds who designed and implemented autonomous citation indexes [notably, CiteSeer and CiteBase], and citation parsing tools clearly proved that citation indexing can be automated successfully if one has some of the intellect, foresight, drive and stamina of Gene Garfield to whom I wish Happy 50th/ 80th.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/04/2006 05:17:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
