The Science Citation Index“: A New Concept In Indexing

THEVARIOUS I N D E X I N G S Y S T E M S presently in existence have one basic goal: to provide researchers with access to the information they require. The stimulus for development of more sophisticated systems has, of course, been the need to probe the growing mass of information documents, Developers of indexing systems are, consequently, concerned not only with establishing a tool which provides access to ideas but also one which can deal with a large mass of information. The user’s interest in indexing systems is similar since his requirement is to be able quickly to extract serviceable ideas from a mass of documents which may contain information of importance to him. The purpose of this paper is to discuss citation indexing and its present application as exemplied by the Science Citation IndexR, published by the Institute for Scientific Information as a new, unique, and necessary tool for scientific work. It is necessary, therefore, to describe briefly, and in general terms, the nature of conventional subject indexing systems in order that a basis for contrast between these and citation indexing can be obtained. For those who wish to read extensively on the subject of indexing, references are provided at the end of the paper under the section “Additional References.”