When it comes to English papers, we have to mention several literature indexes, such as SCI, EI, SSCI, etc. Among them, Science Citation Index (SCI) is currently the most authoritative scientific and technological literature retrieval tool recognized internationally. This has also led to the fact that some colleges and universities now require a certain number of SCI articles for master's and doctoral thesis.
SCI is a journal document search tool published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1960. The Science Citation Index is based on S. C. Bradford's literature discrete law theory and E. Garfield's citation analysis theory. Through statistics such as the citation frequency of a paper, it can analyze a certain article, a certain author's included articles, and a certain article. Statistical analysis can be conducted on all articles from a scientific research unit, a certain journal, or even a certain country or region to determine the international academic level of the analyzed object. Generally speaking, the higher the number of citations of an article, the greater the impact the article has in the research field and the higher the attention it has received from international peers, which means the higher the academic level of the author of the article. The more times a journal is cited overall, the higher the level of the journal in its research field, which is reflected in the higher impact factor. The result of quantifying the indicators of journals and articles, in reality, is to use the impact factor of the journal where the article is located and the number of citations of the article as the standard for evaluating the level of a scientific researcher.
On the web of knowledge, through the paper search function, you can find the publication status of articles at various stages of relevant research topics and the abstracts of the articles. You can also cross-index to get the references cited by the article, as well as the references cited by the article. All kinds of very useful information such as citation status.
SCI mainly collects basic research papers in the natural sciences, so its indicators are mainly applicable to the results of basic research in the natural sciences. This is very unfair to scientific researchers who prefer engineering, because even if they put in a lot of effort and do a lot of applied work, the articles they publish may not be included in SCI. Therefore, the Engineering Index (EI) has become another evaluation criterion. EI is an engineering technology search tool published by American Engineering Information Company. It was purchased by Elsevier in 1998. It contains a large number of engineering technology journals covering various fields of engineering technology. There are not many Chinese journals included in domestic SCI, but there are quite a few journals included in EI. Because the number of journals included in EI is relatively large, it indirectly makes it easier for EI articles to be published. Therefore, many colleges and universities do not regard EI articles as a criterion.
In addition to journals, conferences are another source of articles. The Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP) is used to collect and retrieve conference articles. It was established in 1978 and is edited and published by the American Society for Scientific Information. In the author's field, conference articles are much easier to publish than journal articles, and conference articles basically do not undergo peer review, so the quality is also uneven. Basically, conference articles are not included in personal resumes.