Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - RMZ

Although scientific journals loomed large in the natural sciences throughout the twentieth century, for most of that time they remained diverse in terms of their formats, editorial practices and languages used. While that diversity never truly disappeared, it did narrow toward the end of the century, particularly as refereeing processes and English became increasingly dominant outside English-speaking countries. This paper will investigate one factor in this narrowing: the rise in the 1960s of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and its suite of bibliographical products, including Current Contents, the Science Citation Index and Journal Citation Reports. Its founder, Eugene Garfield, spent a significant portion of each year traveling the world to market his company’s products. Many of these trips involved informal negotiations about including certain publications in ISI’s indexes alongside his promoting particular formats and practices as conditions of inclusion. As publishing metrics came to prominence, strongly associated with ISI, these conditions became a source of significant controversy. The extensive archival record of Garfield’s trips, and his correspondence with advocates of ‘science in developing countries’, provide insight into how standards such as ‘peer review’ were exported beyond the USA and Britain. Among the surprising results of this story is that it may not be quite right to view metrics as a regime of evaluation that arose later to compete with ‘traditional editorial peer review’. Rather, in this global perspective, the rise of citation metrics was co-constituted with the notion that refereeing was a minimum standard of scientific journals.

Alex Csiszar

https://hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/66137712462?pwd=bTF4VG9Ca1BxMkFqOE9xTFZxYldWQT09
Meeting-ID: 661 3771 2462
Passwort: 333635