"Needless to Say My Proposal Was Turned Down”. The Early Days of Commercial Citation Indexing, an 'Error-making' (Popper) Activity and Its Repercussions Till Today.

In today’s neoliberal audit cultures university rankings, quantitative evaluation of publications by JIF (Journal Impact Factor) or researchers by h-index (Hirsch-Index) are believed to be indispensable instruments for “quality assurance” in the sciences. Most of these performance rankings employ citation data provided by huge for-profit North-American media corporation Thomson Reuters (TR). Today TR’s influence on funding decisions, individual careers, departments, universities, disciplines and countries is immense and ambivalent. Yet there is increasing resistance against “impactitis” and “evaluitis”. Usually overseen: Trivial errors in Thomson Reuters’ citation indexes (SCI, SSCI, AHCI) produce severe non-trivial effects: Their victims are authors, institutions, journals with names beyond the ASCII-code and scholars of humanities and social sciences.