The aim of this paper is to highlight and discuss the complexities of scholarly publishing being a practice closely relating to two different systems, the system of academic merit and the system of scholarly communication, by showing how the two systems work on different sets of logic and therefore needs to be analyzed in different ways and using different kinds of data. These complexities are discussed by looking at the ISI databases by Thomson Reuters, information searching and use among scholars and recent attempts at assessing research by using quantitative indicators; and are viewed in part through the recent development of the digitization of the scholarly communication process; and to a larger extent by relating the issues discussed to two models for understanding how academic research is organized
