期刊影响因子的历史和意义

1955年,我第一次在<科学>杂志上提出了影响因子的概念,接着在美国国家健康研究所的支持下,尝试性地出版了遗传学引文索引,继而于1961年出版了科学引文索引(SCI).H.Irving和我创立期刊影响因子来帮助选择增加源期刊.我们认识到那些为数不少且被大量引用的期刊应该收录到科学引文索引中.如果仅依靠期刊的发文量来选择期刊,一些发文量小的期刊将不可能被收录;所以,我们创立了期刊影响因子(JIF).     

Borderline science: expert testimony and the Red River boundary dispute

The 1918 discovery of oil in the bed of the Red River, which forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma, led to a U.S. Supreme Court case that involved the extensive use of expert witnesses in fields such as geology, geography, and ecology. What began as a dispute between the two states soon became a multisided controversy involving those states, the federal government, Native Americans, and individual placer-mining claimants. After the federal attorneys introduced scientific experts into the dispute, including the plant ecologist Henry Chandler Cowles and the geographer Isaiah Bowman, fresh from negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, Texas attorneys fielded their own team of opposing experts. Charged with the task of determining the location of the border, defined as the south bank of the river at the time of the 1819 treaty with Spain, the scientific experts presented the court with volumes of evidence and elaborate arguments, much of it contradictory and involving creative interpretations of existing theories. The case exhibited all the now-familiar features of a trial using expert witnesses, for which it represents an early, overlooked, and particularly complex example.