Metrics of Scientific Journalism - Truths, Myths and Misconceptions

The evolution of the digital age has led to the development of so-called abstracting/indexing printed publications in online databases. A short survey of the four most popular databases in Croatia has been done, as Current Contents, Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, with short history, coverage (included Croatian titles), features and possibilities of citation analysis. We discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and the importance of the efficient usage and appropriate interpretation of the data. The journal impact factor and other bibliometric measures are frequently misused to estimate the influence of individual papers and authors. Explaining potential benefits and limitations of bibliometric indicators, this article may help policymakers, librarians, administrators, and individual researchers to use the data provided by different databases more carefully and wisely in the evaluation of research.