ISI Essential Science Indicators

Essential Science Indicators (ESI) provides internet access to a compilation of essential science performance statistics and science trends data derived from ISI's databases. The chief indicators of output, or productivity, are journal article publication counts. For influence and impact measures, ESI employs both total citation counts and cites per paper scores. The former reveals gross influence while the latter shows weighted influence, also called impact.

Types of data featured in ESI include most cited author rankings, institutional (university, corporate, government research lab) rankings, national rankings, and journal rankings. Another unique feature is the listing of research areas called Research Fronts, algorithmically derived topics reflecting research intensive and breakthrough areas of current science. An editorial feature called Special Topics gives special attention to selected areas of research.

Highly cited papers and hot papers have been selected for ESI based on percentile rankings specific to fields of science and specific time periods. While highly cited papers are chosen from the most recent 10 years of data, hot papers focus on very recent papers (from the past two years) that show an unusual rate of citation in the current period. Both highly cited and hot papers are searchable by a variety of attributes.

FYI

• It is important to recognize that the data in ESI are limited to ISI-indexed journal articles only. No books, book chapters, or articles published in journals not indexed by ISI are taken into account here, either in terms of publication or citation counts.
• Data is updated every two to four months.
• Check out the HELP (and I'd put a link in here but for the fact that the page consists of frames! UGH!)
• ESI is a part of the ISI Web of Knowledge.