Content area
Full Text
Introduction
The history of research, development and innovation is built on the basis of proceeding research. Many of the papers, notes, reviews, corrections and correspondence published in the journal literature contain citations. Citations are the formal, explicit linkages between current research and prior work stored in the vast archive of the scientific literature (Bhushan and Lal, 1991). Citation indexes resolve semantic problems associated with other traditional subject indexes by using citation symbology rather than words to describe the contents of a document. Primarily citation indexes perform two functions, i.e. research and evaluation (Prakash, 2010).
The Indian citation index (ICI) is a gateway to access, assess, evaluate and map knowledge contents published in journals of Indian origin. It is a multidisciplinary abstracts and citation database, covering 1,000 plus peer-reviewed source journals from 2004 to the present. The goal of ICI is to catalyze global visibility and availability of Indian expertise and knowledge. It provides a powerful search engine basically to perform (I) as a ground for an effective, rigorous evaluation and (II) to ensure access to articles published in journals of Indian origin. ICI allows users to search, track and measure research output in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, and to run raw data/information into the powerful knowledge one needs (Prakash, 2011).
The ICI was launched in New Delhi in October 2009. This database is the first of its kind in India, which covers both titles and their citations. The ICI is developed by "The Knowledge Foundation" (a registered society) with the support of Diva Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. and help of Mr Prakash Chand, Ex-Scientist NISCAIR CSIR, who is one of the pioneers in India to develop, preserve, disseminate and serve customized knowledge products and services to the scholarly world. There are few tools/databases that are available that provide coverage of Indian contents particularly published in local national journals (Sen and Lakshmi, 1992). ICI is trying to bridge this gap.
The contents of ICI are organized in 12 subject groups with 52 main subject categories and include case studies, observations (R&D), opinion papers, patents, conference papers, reports (R&D), research articles, research methods, research notes, review articles, short communications, special articles, etc. that have appeared in the journals covered. ICI provides a wide array of...