ISI Journals

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992,and became known as Thomson ISI. It is now is part of the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters.ISI offered bibliographic database services. Its specialty: citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield. It maintains citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). All of these are available via ISI’s Web of Knowledge database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them. The database provides some measure of the academic impact of the papers indexed in it, and may increase their impact by making them more visible and providing them with a quality label. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that appearing in this database can double the number of citations received by a given paper.The ISI also publishes the annual Journal Citation Reports which list an impact factor for each of the journals that it tracks. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors play a large but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist’s published research record.