Respected Members, The Indian Citation Index (ICI) is now becoming reality and hereby I am posting the introductory message on ICI by Mr. Prakash Chand, former Head of National Science Library and former Coordinator of CSIR e-journal Consortium. "Dear all, At first I wish you a very happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year 2010. Now I am completing six months of my superannuation from NISCAIR. I am happy to inform you that I have utilized this time to realize the dream of having long awaited "Indian Citation Index (ICI)" as a product/tool for the benefit of R&D community including planers, decision makers, funding agencies etc. You are well aware that "Indian Citation Index" is in talks by many people, organizations, and groups etc. for two decade but nothing could be translated. With a view to address this long felt need I started from July 2009 to plan, develop and bring out a multidisciplinary Indian Citation Index (ICI) through a society named "Knowledge Foundation" and in collaboration with M/s Divan Enterprise. Apparently, India is contributing good amount of knowledge contents but there is no tool for evaluation and measurement of its impact, quality and quantity. At international level few tools/databases like WoS and SCOPUS are available but coverage of Indian knowledge contents in these databases are negligible. Therefore, these tools/databases are not adequate to evaluate/analyze India's knowledge contents. To resolve similar limitation of international databases, few countries, like China, Korea, Japan etc. have already brought out their own citation indexes but we could not do it. Indian researchers, scholars, policy makers, decision takers, funding agencies and others too are facing it as a big problem to perform objectively and therefore, they essentially need this tool on immediate basis. Indian Citation Index Database (ICI) is a multidisciplinary research platform primarily intend to perform literature search and multiple angle evaluation using citations similar to international databases like WoS and SCOPUS. Citation databases are specialized Abstracting & Indexing information products used to evaluate, map and measure information contents using citations as the association of R&D ideas. The references that researchers cite in their papers make explicit links between their current research and prior work in the literature archive. Indian Citation Index (ICI) organizes these intellectual links by listing both cited and citing works. Like other indexes, ICI enables users to move back in time to previously published papers, but uniquely one can also look forward in time to determine who has subsequently cited an earlier piece of research. Indian Citation Index (ICI) is a home grown database, planed to have multidisciplinary information/knowledge contents from about 1000 top Indian scholarly journals. It provides powerful search engine basically to perform search and evaluation for researchers, policy makers, decision makers etc. At present, it is planned to start with five years back files (depth) which would go over 10 years and beyond in next few month's time. ICI right now is in zero version stage and its alpha version is being issued for users feedback and comments by 15th January 2010 and thereafter shortly its beta version would be launched. It is also planed and working accordingly that in next few months ICI with full search and analytic features would be served to users for using long awaited essentially needed information product. The ICI is owned by M/s Divan Enterprise for all practical purposes. With above brief introduction, it is requested to use it and give your opinion, comments, observation etc. so that ICI may be corrected/molded accordingly and it can be made user friendly to extent possible . Here I would like to mention that so far the developed stage of ICI is 20% only of the total development and rest 80% development is going on rigorously which would be available to users soon. Currently you may access it by URL: indiancitationindex.com I once again wish you very 2 happy new year 2010 and look forward for your feedback/comments etc. on ICI as a product and its utility. Thanks -----------------------Prakash Chand" e-mail: prakash@indiancitationindex.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.