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EDITORIAL ACADEMIC CITATION INDICES AND DATABASES DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14420/en.2014.3.1
An academic citation index becomes very important at the present time. In simple terms, it is an index of relevance of research papers, that is how often academic pursuits of an author in his/her creative work are used in scholarly works. A sort of «importance» factor of scholarly works. An academic citation index serves as a communication tool of a citing person with an author of a work cited and revelation of an amount of citing of any given scholar’s works. In the process of creation of scholarly works an author studies in the first place creative works on analogous subject matter. It affords opportunity to be aware of a level of a topic scholarly development, its timeliness and in general, at which stage of scholarly knowledge the studied processes are. In writing an author uses conclusions of other authors which help him to come to results which an author achieves as a result of his work. On the basis of the aforementioned, an author refers to words and conclusions of academics which he used in writing his work. Citation index follows reference data and keeps their count, but with that citation index databases contain full-text materials as well. It affords authors an opportunity in study of some work to switch to references cited and study works referred to in studied work. Consequently, citation index is useful not only as reference count and a sort of tool of determination of relevancy of scholarly works for society, but as a library where if necessary one can find required materials. Today we have rather substantial volume of manifold citation systems of a sort of databases which include works of various authors in various academic areas, such as physics, chemistry, legal sciences, biology etc. Here are some of them: Web of Science, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, Astrophysics, PubMed, Mathematics, Chemical Abstracts, Springer, Agris, GeoRef. The largest are WEB OF SCIENCE and SCOPUS. It is worth mentioning that magazines included in the said citation systems automatically fall within the list of magazines recommended by the RF Higher Attestation Commission. The citation index traces its roots to as early as 1873, legal sciences were the first (Shepard’s Citations). After that the Institute for Scientific Information in 1960 introduces citation index for articles published in academic periodicals, «Science