A new tool for scholars.(Editorial)

In 1978 Pamela Taylor, the foundation Librarian of the AGSM, introduced us to the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), a set of heavy tomes that listed published papers and their citations. The excellent thing was that a separate volume indexed the citations. This meant that a researcher could look up a paper, find its references, and then find all other published papers that cited each of these references. Then the researcher could find new references perhaps later than the first paper, and see what these papers had referenced. And so on. With some effort the SSCI allowed a researcher to stand on the shoulders of previous scholars, and generate a good list of the relevant research papers in any field, and in related fields too, if she wished.

The effort to use the SSCI was greatly reduced when it appeared on CD-ROMs in the mid-1990s, although the University Library possessed a single set only, which often led to a queue of researchers waiting to use it. But the electronic version was much more convenient to use.

The queues of scholars disappeared a few years later when the SSCI went online. As the Web of Science, it is now available to all who subscribe. But for some researchers, the value of the SSCI (and its stable mates, the Science Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index) is reduced because of its lack of comprehensive coverage of refereed journals. For example, I have published in economics journals (well covered), in policy journals (somewhat covered), in drugs journals (spotty coverage), and in computer science journals (these often fall between 'science' and 'social science' and are not at all well…