Computed databases CAVEAT

On the subject of how much impact computational chemists have on the scientific community, a quantifiable measure of a person s contribution to a scientific field, besides the physical mass of one s publications, is the number of citations to a person s papers. It is usually assumed that the more popular a new method, or the more valuable new data, the more the work will be used and cited by subsequent authors. Thus, the number of citations has become one of many measures of the scientific community s assessment of the merits of a person s work. However, critics point to various faults with citation frequency data. For example, some scientists can have a profound and lasting influence on a field of research and still not be the most highly cited. Some scientists can be highly cited and not have much influence beyond their own sphere of interest. Self citation can inflate numbers. Another caveat about citation rankings arises from how the ISI database stores a person s identity. If two or more people share the same last name and initial(s), then they could be miscounted as the same person. Conversely, if an author uses two initials in some papers and only one initial in other papers, then that person could be counted as two different individuals. Furthermore, if a person s name changes or if a person s name is misspelled or spelled inconsistently in citations, that person s citations could look misleadingly low. Fortunately, most of the well-known computational chemists have individualistic names. Further discussion of the issues associated with citation analysis can be found elsewhere. Citation frequency in the field of computational chemistry was earlier analyzed in this book series. ... 

The central database used is named the "SDC International Mergers Acquisitions Database". This database records all large M As since the late seventies for US companies, while all major international transactions are recorded as of 1985. The last recorded transactions are dated at the begiiming of 1998. Since the SDC database originates in the US, it is probably biased towards recording transactions involving US entities, and possibly European ones. This caveat must be borne in mind when absolute comparisons are made. However, this should not affect relative comparisons, that is when shares and growth rates are computed. 

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