CITATION ANALYSIS -- From the ISI Essential Science Indicators Home page, you can access the two Citation Analysis options: Baselines and Research Fronts.

Baselines - Baselines are measures of cumulative citation frequency across large groups of papers that provide expected citation rates for groups or tiers of papers. Within Baselines, ISI Essential Science Indicators provides Average Citation Rates and Percentiles.

For each field of study, Average Citation Rates are calculated for each year of the ten year period covered in ISI Essential Science Indicators. Averages are calculated by adding up the citation counts of individual papers and dividing by the number of those papers. You can compare the citations per paper for a scientist in a field of study, for example, to the average citation rates for that field to determine how that scientist's papers compare to the average.

The Percentiles table shows the citation count threshold for four different percentile cuts for each field and year. The levels we have selected for listing by field and year are 0.01%, 0.1%, 1.0%, and 10%. Using the percentiles table, you can determine, for instance, the number of citations required to be in the top 0.01% for a particular field of study.

Research Fronts - A Research Front is a group of related highly cited papers, referred to as "core papers," in a specialized topic defined by a cluster analysis. Clusters are formed by selecting all papers that can be linked together by a specified co-citation threshold. Research Fronts offer an alternative classification scheme for highly cited papers since the assignment of papers to a Research Front is not based on the journal categories used in ISI Essential Science Indicators. You can view all the Research Fronts in a selected field or search by topic words.