Unveiling the Power of Web of Science
About Web of Science
Web of Science Core Collection provides researchers, administrators, faculty, and students with quick, powerful access to the world's leading citation databases. Web of Science contains authoritative, multidisciplinary content and covers over 12,000 of the highest impact journals worldwide, including Open Access journals and over 150,000 conference proceedings. The database includes current and retrospective coverage in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Thompson-ISI is very selective in the journal selection process and this database includes only the most highly regarded publications in a field. Coverage began in 1900.
Strengths:
- The most authentic citation index of high impact journals
- Very large coverage in Sciences
- Large coverage of book citations in Arts and humanities
Weaknesses:
- Limited coverage of non-English language publications
- Weaker coverage of Arts and Humanities disciplines
Register/Sign in on Web of Science
It is important for users to register for Web of Science as this helps you to:
- Automatically sign in every time you access Web of Science
- One sign-in gives access to all 3 resources — Web of Science, Endnote and Researcher ID
- Set a preference to start your session in a specific database or product
- Save searches in Web of Science
- Access saved searches and search history
- Create alerts
- Add references to your EndNote Library
Article Metrics & Citation References
Citation metrics are statistics gathered on the number of times an article has been cited by other articles. A Cited Reference search in Web of Science will display the number of articles which have cited a particular article. If the author has published in journals not indexed in the Web of Science, a Cited Reference Search (rather than by author name) will result in a more complete listing of that author's works.
To carry out a Cited Reference search:
- Select Cited Reference Search from the blue drop-down menu above the search box
- Enter the details of the article you wish to find citations to
- Click Search
- The article details will be listed, including a 'Citing Articles' column
- Click View Record (if available) to access the article record in Web of Science. From here you can find the details of the articles which have cited this one
Journal Metrics
Web of Science can link to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database, which provides Impact Factors for all the journals indexed by Web of Science. Impact Factor allows for the comparison and ranking of journals within the same discipline. The Impact Factor only measures the interest of other researchers in an article, not its importance and usefulness. More information, tutorials & glossary of terms about the Impact Factor is available here.
To find the Impact Factor of a journal:
- Carry out an author search in Web of Science
- Click on the title of the article which is published in the journal you're interested in to bring up the record of the article
- Scroll down to the 'Journal Information' section, and click on the 'Journal Citation Reports' link
- This will take you into JCR and display the current and historical Impact Factor of the journal
Author Searches
Search by the title and author name(s) to locate a specific article. The author name plus subject, institution and/or publication years will find all articles by an author.
The number of citations:
- Includes only those articles indexed within the database
- Will vary depending on the database coverage e.g. sources, date range
Web of science measures citation counts and h-index.
To search by author:
- Select Web of Science Core Collection from the All Databases menu
- Choose Author search from the drop down menu next to Basic search box
- Type in author name followed by initials - select author search (you may look up the author index to find the correct variant of the author name)
- Click search
- For Citation Report , click the create citation report on the top right of the page. It gives you the graphs showing citation patterns and a calculation of the author's h-index
Web of Science Core Collection — Author Searching
In the world of research literature, author names can vary between publications, making accurate searching challenging. This video offers guidance on improving search accuracy by accounting for variations in author names. The tutorial demonstrates how to use the Author Search tool step by step, refining searches through research domains and affiliations.
