Abstract
Learning to search on the Web of Science: A reply to the Aluja, Becoña, Botella, Colom, Echeburúa, Forns, Pérez and Vila (2011) study. The aims of this paper are, on the one hand, to present the differences in the results that may be incurred when working with some automated database functions to obtain scientific production and, on the other hand, to reveal the mistakes made by Aluja et al. (2011) in their considerations and suggestions to the study of Olivas-Avila and Musi-Lechuga (2010a). In this paper, we show that the procedure used to replicate the study is incorrect and, therefore, the authors did not only confuse production with diffusion indicators, but also suggest many indicators that have no discriminative power with the sample studied," and the most striking"one hundred percent out of the ten cases analyzed were incorrectly analyzed and, therefore, the results do not correspond to the real record count in the Web of Science (WoS). In some cases, the errors involved items omitted from the WoS. The authors also propose rates like the percentage of articles in journals of Spanish spheres, or the percentage of items as first author. These indexes have no theoretical or empirical justification or previous studies that support them.
