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Dr. Peter Jacso took his expertise on cited reference searching to Asia in a recent Thomson Reuters lecture tour focusing on the dimensions of the underlying databases and their implications in calculating publishing performance measures of researchers and journals.

Dr. Peter Jacso is Professor, Department of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii, USA. During his tour of six Asian cities in July 2008 he was accompanied by Dr. Lim Khee Hiang, Principal Trainer with the Scientific business of Thomson Reuters in Asia Pacific, who gave practical presentations on ResearcherID, the global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community. The lectures were attended by librarians, researchers and academics from tertiary educational institutions in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Tainan and Taipei, and by journal editors of the Medical Society in Hong Kong.

Dr. Jacso has received much international recognition for his analyses of database quality, content and software evaluation of scholarly digital archives and other digital reference sources. He has published several books and conference papers, and written more than 500 papers and reviews in research publications such as the Annual Review of Information Science & Technology, Library Trends, Current Science and Cortex, in conference proceedings (National Online Meeting, International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries), as well as in his regular columns and editorials in Online, Online Information Review, Database, Computers in Libraries and Information Today.

Essential database deatures for measuring scholarly publishing performance
The lecture series explored the practical aspects of using – in addition to the perceptions-based ranking and rating by peers – more objective and reproducible measures for evaluating the scholarly publishing performance of individual scholars, research groups, institutions and even countries based on citation analyses using cited reference enhanced databases. Dr. Jacso demonstrated the essential content characteristics and key features of the citation matching and parsing process in some of the major subject-specific and multidisciplinary databases, that are critical for computing citation-based measures of scholarly productivity and impact.

Traditional and novel measures for evaluating scholarly journals
This segment of the lecture tour for publishers, editors, authors and librarians focused on the traditional and the citation-based novel methods for evaluating readership levels, the feasibility of launching new journals, and making journal subscriptions and cancellation decisions . It discussed the performance measures for scholarly publications including the interpretation, reproduction and visualisation of citation relationships, as well as short-term and long-term productivity and impact factors, the h-index and its variants. By analysing, understanding and promoting these measures of performance and influence, editors are better able to evaluate and improve the visibility and clout of their journals, to advise potential authors and subscribers about editorial policies , and to recruit peer reviewers. Knowing and using such indicators also help in collection development and reference services.

The ResearcherID feature of Web of Science
The lecture tour also featured a presentation by Dr. Lim Khee Hiang who has published more than 54 publications in international journals, transactions and proceedings. He introduced ResearcherID, which offers researchers access to standardized and clarified author names and citation information in a global, multidisciplinary scholarly research community. This gives users the opportunity to manage public presentation of personal citation metrics and enables the research community the control on how their information is shared with peers around the world.

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