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Institute for Scientific Information

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was founded by Eugene Garfield in 1960. It was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, became known as Thomson ISI and now as Thomson Scientific. It is a component of the multi-billion dollar Thomson Reuters Corporation.

The ISI offers bibliographic database services. Its speciality is citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield. It maintains citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). All of these are available via ISI's Web of Knowledge database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them.

The ISI also publishes annual Journal Citation Reports which list an impact factor for each of the journals that it tracks. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors play a large but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist's published research record.

A list of over 14,000 journals is maintained by the ISI. The list includes over 1100 arts and humanities journals as well as scientific journals. Listing is based on published selection criteria and is an important indicator of journal quality and impact.^[1]

The ISI also publishes a list of highly cited researchers, one of the factors included in the Academic Ranking of World Universities published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.