Web of Science with the Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes: the case of computer science

In September 2008 Thomson Reuters added to the ISI Web of Science (WOS) the Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes for Science and for the Social Sciences and Humanities. This paper examines how this change affects the publication and citation counts of highly cited computer scientists. Computer science is a field where proceedings are a major publication venue. The results show that most of the highly cited publications of the sampled researchers are journal publications, but these highly cited items receive more than 40% of their citations from proceedings papers. The paper also discusses issues related to double-counting, i.e., when a given work is published both in a proceedings and later on as a journal paper.