Searching Institute for Scientific Information databases at the Deutsches Institut fuer Medizinische Dokumentation und Information, Cologne

The aim of the paper is to illustrate the retrieval methods used to count the number of citations in the Institute for Scientific Information online databases (SciSearch and Social SciSearch) made available by the Deutsches Institut fur Medizinische Dokumentation und Information host computer. Citation analysis is a bibliometric measure increasingly applied to evaluate the publication quality of individual scientists or research groups. Therefore, it is very important to know, and to use correctly, the search methods made available to retrieve the number of citations. Different search methods and their specific features and limits are discussed, and practical problems in working with the online citation indices are described, highlighting the pivotal role of information specialists to make accessible, and to better use, the database data and the retrieval techniques, thus providing vital information to institutions and research activity.