Eugene Garfield has provided a basis for the development and growth of scientometrics and promotion of sociology of science with his Current Contents and in particular with the Science Citation Index.
The rationales for building SCIndeks: Serbian Citation Index are described. CIndeks was built as a hybrid product designed to meet the two “natural” priorities of science in a small developing country such as Serbia: promoting national research results internationally and supporting non-arbitrary, quantitative evaluation of academic entities.
The article is dealing with the issue, what are the reasons that bibliometrics has appeared in the second half of 20th century as additional element in R&D evaluations (along peer review which has longer historical tradition).
For evaluating research performance a reliable bibliographic base is required; in this respect, Slovenian state bodies responsible for allocating public funds for this purpose rely on COBISS.
