Citation index
[2] Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.
[9] In 1959, Garfield started a consulting business, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), in Philadelphia and began a correspondence with Joshua Lederberg about the idea.
[18] It is often mentioned in popular science articles that the research output of countries in South America, Asia, and Africa are disappointingly low.
[note 4] Research outputs in this context refers to papers specifically published in peer-reviewed journals that are indexed in Scopus.
[19][20][21] Research outputs in this context refers to papers specifically published in peer-reviewed journals that are indexed either in Scopus or WoS.
[12] While Scopus is larger and geographically broader than WoS, it still only covers a fraction of journal publishing outside North America and Europe.
[note 10] Furthermore, the editorial boards of the journals contained in Wos and Scopus databases are integrated by researchers from western Europe and North America.
[23] Similarly,[24]) studied ten leading marketing journals in WoS and Scopus databases, and concluded that 85.3% of their editorial board members are based in the United States.
[24] Comparison with subject-specific indexes has further revealed the geographical and topic bias – for example Ciarli[25] found that by comparing the coverage of rice research in CAB Abstracts (an agriculture and global health database) with WoS and Scopus, the latter "may strongly under-represent the scientific production by developing countries, and over-represent that by industrialised countries", and this is likely to apply to other fields of agriculture.
[26] The overpromotion of these databases diminishes the important role of "local" and "regional" journals for researchers who want to publish and read locally-relevant content.
[32][33] A far-reaching consequence of the use of English as the lingua franca of science is in knowledge production, because its use benefits "worldviews, social, cultural, and political interests of the English-speaking center" ([31] p. 123).
[35][30] In other words, "the ongoing internationalisation has not meant academic interaction and exchange of knowledge, but the dominance of the leading Anglophone journals in which international debates occurs and gains recognition".
However, there is still a lot of work to be done to recognise and amplify the growing body of research literature generated by those outside North America and Europe.
[37] Academia has not yet built digital infrastructures which are equal, comprehensive, multi-lingual and allows fair participation in knowledge creation.
