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Concerns Regarding FJ Express Citations and Thomson ISI

Thomson ISI will continue to review our methods and revise our processes to adapt to changing models within the publishing industry. Your feedback is welcome and can be sent to: philip.heller{at}thomson.com.

Background
There have been a number of issues raised by authors and publishers regarding how citations to The FASEB Journal are handled by Thomson ISI. There has been an ongoing dialog between the FASEB staff and Thomson ISI regarding these issues. This brief document has been written in the hope of clarifying how citations are handled now, and will be in the future.

The Issue
Most electronic journals mirror their print counterpart. Often articles are posted electronically before appearing in the print issue. The FASEB Journal has a feature known as FJ Express, where the definitive copy of the article appears in electronic format and never appears in print in full form (although it does in summary format). The definitive article is electronic only and does not have traditional pagination. The FASEB Journal has opted to use the DOI (digital object identifier) as the unique article identifier. DOIs are assigned by most STM publishers to articles and are most frequently used as the persistent link to the content.

The FJ Express model poses technical challenges for Thomson ISI. Presently we are unable to attribute and link citations to these articles within the Web of Science. While ISI's current system allows for the use of pagination or article numbers, it cannot accommodate the length and format of the DOI string of characters. Thomson ISI cannot link citations to FASEB Express articles solely using the DOI. Therefore, the "Times Cited" feature within the Web of Science does not accurately reflect the number of citations to FJ Express articles.

The Impact Factor
The only citation data elements required to calculate an impact factor are the journal title and year. The FASEB Journal's impact factor is not affected by the use or non-use of the DOI. Any citations to FJ Express articles, or any other section in The FASEB Journal, are counted toward the calculation of the journal's impact factor.

Next Steps
We are currently working on expanding our citation to source links system which will accommodate FJ Express; citations will then be counted and posted in "Times Cited" in the Web of Science as they occur. This is expected to be released by the spring of 2005. Should this planned implementation date change, it will be communicated to FASEB and posted as an update to this document.