Abstract
In this article, I investigate the extent to which ISI Web of Science indexing contributes to the impact of an academic paper. I do this by analysing the results of a natural experiment consisting in the accidental exclusion from the index of an entire issue of a Political Science journal. The statistical tests indicate a significant effect of ISI indexing on the number of citations received by individual papers. The conclusion is that ISI indexing does not simply provide an objective measure of academic impact, but it also affects academic impact itself. This fact provides evidence that, in spite of the increasing competition from other providers such as Scopus or Google Scholar, ISI indexing still has a considerable amount of market power.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Althouse, B.M., West, J.D., Bergstrom, C.T. and Bergstrom, T. (2009) ‘Differences in impact factor across fields and over time’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60 (1): 27–34.
Angrist, J.D. and Pischke, J.-S. (2009) Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Antelman, K. (2004) ‘Do open-access articles have a greater research impact?’ College & Research Libraries 65 (5): 372–382.
Cameron, B.D. (2005) ‘Trends in the usage of ISI bibliometric data: uses, abuses, and implications’, Libraries and the Academy 5 (1): 105–125.
Cantor, R. and Packer, F. (1996) ‘Determinants and impacts of sovereign credit ratings’, Economic Policy Review 2 (2): 37–54.
Conlon, D.E., Morgeson, F.P., McNamara, G., Wiseman, R.M. and Skilton, P.F. (2006) ‘From the editors: examining the impact and role of special issue and regular journal articles in the field of management’, The Academy of Management Journal 49 (5): 857–872.
Davis, P.M. (2011) ‘Open access, readership, citations: a randomized controlled trial of scientific journal publishing’, The FASEB Journal 25 (7): 2129–2134.
Vanclay, J.K. (2009) ‘Bias in the journal impact factor’, Scientometrics 78 (1): 3–12.
Varela, D. (2009) ‘Just a lobbyist? The European Parliament and the consultation procedure’, European Union Politics 10 (1): 7–34.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Varela, D. The Contribution of ISI Indexing to a Paper's Citations: Results of a Natural Experiment. Eur Polit Sci 12, 245–253 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2012.29
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2012.29