Measuring the Impact of Arabic Scientific Publication: Challenges and Proposed Solution

Introduction Citation Indices are very useful tools that were firstly used to help finding articles easily and then, used to provide information about research output. They can be used as indicator to measure research performance, provide information about trends in research and compare and rank the research output of countries, institutes and authors. It is well known that English is the universal language for science and technology and that have resulted in having many citation indices like Web of Science (Formerly ISI) and SCOPUS. It has been reported in the literature that such Indices overlook and hide publications in other languages (van Leeuwen et al., 2001) and that -with other reasonshave resulted in having indices for other languages like Chinese, Portuguese and Korean. Arabic publications is one of the least represented in the scientific community despite its been spoken by more than 200 million which makes it the fifth spoken language in the world (Gordon Jr., 2005). This work investigates the possibility of making a Citation Index for Arabic literature and addresses the challenges associated with that. This is supported by initial implementation of web based Arabic Citation Index (ACI).