Institute for Scientific Information

Overview
Founded in 1960, the Institute for Scientific Information ('ISI) was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, became known as "Thomson ISI" and now is part of the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters.

ISI offers bibliographic database services. Its specialty: citation indexing and analysis. It maintains citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). All of these are available via ISI's Web of Knowledge database service. This database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who has cited them. The database not only provides an objective measure of the academic impact of the papers indexed in it, but also increases their impact by making them more visible and providing them with a quality label.