numbers are not data and data are not indicators Over 200 papers produced by a multidisciplinary institute in a ten-year period were analyzed for the context of the P. Vinkler, Scientometrics, 30, 495-504 (1994) citations they received during the 21-year period since ''What is truth,'' says Pilate, and would not stand for an their publication. They were grouped into 28 research topics from physics, chemistry, to biology, some half a answer. Facts are sacred, if you can discover them, and dozen papers per topic on the average. Eleven percent as long as you don't confuse them with values. . . . of all the citing papers comprised the sample for the P. D. James, Innocent Blood context analysis: one citing per each cited paper. Sets of citing papers of each research topic were taken as units in the analysis. The context of citation was defined by (i) a structural factor, i.e., the location at which the This is the third paper from a longitudinal study of the scale was devised by arbitrary ponders, whereas from citation echo to the publications from a (natural) sciences (ii) another arbitrary scale was constructed by a 2:1 ratio institute. We avoid the use of ''impact'' because of its for high-to-low citing. The two approaches, citing locavalue-laden meaning; ''echo'' is preferred because it is tion (i) and intensity (ii), were also combined into an neutral, indicating simply that there is/are citation events.
ordinal scale without any arbitrary numerical pondering. The 28 research topics were ranked by Z-scores within
The methodology is still being refined. In the two earlier each of the three scales and separately for the first and papers (Ferligoj et al., 1988;Luz ˇar et al., 1992) the frethe second decade of citation recordings. The congruquencies (counts) of citations were analyzed. For a few ence of the ranking was very satisfactory between the extreme cases it was possible to relate the citation frethree scales for each of the two decades of citing. Howquencies of the published output to its scientific merit. A ever, very definite trends in the rankings are noted between the two decades, the trends being quite similar broader framework for our research is provided now by irrespective of the ranking scale applied. The ranking is Allen, Qin, and Lancaster (1994): ''We chose to focus believed to be a function of the importance of the cited on persuasive communities to assess the internationalism papers for those citing them. When these citation-conof science because it seemed to us that internationalism text-ranking results were compared with the ranking of is not defined simply by having productive scientists in the research topics by citation frequency counts, no congruence was observed. a number of regions or countries. Contributions must be communicated, recognized and incorporated into the general understanding of what constitutes accepted (and per-