Commentary: Fifty years of citation indexing

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Abstract
About 30 years ago we began the series called ‘This week's Citation Classic’. Over the next 15 years, we asked thousands of authors to write commentaries on these highly cited papers (www.citationclassics.org). So I was surprised to be asked to do the same for my 1955 paper in Science.1 As a confirmed citationist, I must point out that it is not my most cited work. It is my 1972 paper in Science,2 on using citation analysis to evaluate journals, which has attracted much more attention, although the 1955 paper is far more significant. In that sense, I am like many other authors who feel that their most-cited work is not necessarily their best. My most-cited work is in fact my 1979 book Citation Indexing.3