"Needles to say my proposal was turned down." The early days of commercial citation Indexing, an "error-making" activity and its repercussions till today.

Today university rankings and performance rankings (often based on JIFs, h-indexes) are believed to be indispensable to assure scientific “quality”. Most of these performance rankings employ citation data provided by Thomson Reuters. TR’s current influence on funding decisions, individual careers, institutions, disciplines and countries is immense and ambivalent. There is increasing resistance against “impactitis” and “evaluitis”. Usually overseen: Trivial errors in TR’s citation indexes (SCI, SSCI, AHCI) produce severe non-trivial effects: Their victims are authors, institutions, journals with names beyond the ASCIIcode and scholars of humanities and social sciences. Based on the Joshua Lederberg Papers I claim: To overcome severe resistance Eugene Garfield and Joshua Lederberg had to foster overoptimistic attitudes and to downplay the severe problems connected to global and multidisciplinary citation indexing. The dificulties to handle different formats of references and footnotes, non- Anglo-American names, and of publications in non-English languages were known to the pioneers of citation indexing.