Off topic a bit, but very important news for anyone who uses the web in research for scholarly papers and books: for years now, the ISI indices, a costly system of interrelated citation databases that track thousands of publications in dozens of disciplines, have been pretty much the only way to track how papers are cited and used. Many universities actually grade faculty on the basis of a “citation count” from ISI, and journals (like ours) make claims about their influence on the basis of similar ISI searches. Enter Google Scholar. This service will literally revolutionize the tracking of the lifetimes and reach of articles, because it at a minimum provides a much, much wider scan of articles than does ISI, and the implication of Google providing this service is that it can be integrated into the Internet at large. It is pretty easy to speculate that if John Dewey were alive, he would mark this event among the more important possible links between the scholarly world and public discourse. According to MIT’s Blogdex, the best ranking of “who is visiting what on the Internet,” scholar.google.com was the single most visited site on the entire Internet today. Needless to say, bioethics journals and their publications show up all over this thing, which is still in beta by the way, and it will be fun to pick around. If you find anything (after you do your vanity search) let us know.
Labels: ahead of the curve, blogging, Google, ISI indices, technology, tenure