East European History

published or submitted for publicatio

Special Libraries, July 1978

Volume 69, Issue 7https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1978/1005/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, March 1977

Volume 68, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1977/1002/thumbnail.jp

Legal Information and the Development of American Law: Writings on the Form and Structure of the Published Law

Robert C. Berring\u27s writings about the impacts of electronic databases, the Internet, and other communications technologies on legal research and practice are an essential part of a larger literature that explores the ways in which the forms and structures of published legal information have influenced how American lawyers think about the law. This paper reviews Berring\u27s writings, along with those of other writers concerned with these questions, focusing on the implications of Berring\u27s idea that in the late nineteenth century American legal publishers created a conceptual universe of thinkable thoughts through which U.S. lawyers came to view the law. It concludes that, spurred by Berring and others, the literature of legal information has become far reaching in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, while the themes struck in Berring\u27s work continue to inform the scholarship of newer writers

Special Libraries, May-June 1977

Volume 68, Issue 5-6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1977/1004/thumbnail.jp

"Needless to Say My Proposal Was Turned Down": The Early Days of Commercial Citation Indexing, an "Error-making" Activity and Its Repercussions Till Today

In today’s neoliberal audit cultures university rankings, quantitative evaluation of publications by JIF or researchers by h-index are believed to be indispensable instruments for “quality assurance” in the sciences. Yet there is increasing resistance against “impactitis” and “evaluitis”. Usually overseen: Trivial errors in Thomson Reuters’ citation indexes produce severe non-trivial effects: Their victims are authors, institutions, journals with names beyond the ASCII-code and scholars of humanities and social sciences. Analysing the “Joshua Lederberg Papers” I want to illuminate eventually successful ‘invention’ of science citation indexing is a product of contingent factors. To overcome severe resistance Eugene Garfield, the “father” of citation indexing, had to foster overoptimistic attitudes and to downplay the severe problems connected to global and multidisciplinary citation indexing. The difficulties to handle different formats of references and footnotes, non-Anglo-American names, and of publications in non-English languages were known to the pioneers of citation indexing. Nowadays the huge for-profit North-American media corporation Thomson Reuters is the owner of the citation databases founded by Garfield. Thomson Reuters’ influence on funding decisions, individual careers, departments, universities, disciplines and countries is immense and ambivalent. Huge technological systems show a heavy inertness. This insight of technology studies is applicable to the large citation indexes by Thomson Reuters, too