Library News

Web of Science (WoS) is a database researchers primarily used for literature searches. WoS also provides insightful publishing metrics at the article, author, and journal levels. WoS also provides insightful publishing metrics to help you discover trends and understand the impact of your research.

There are several ways you can search WoS, including topic, author, affiliation, journal, and funding agency. Search results can be refined in a number of ways, such as publication year, document type, and language. By default, search results are sorted by relevance. You can also sort by publication date or citation count.

Articles that have been cited enough times to put them in the top 1% of their field are flagged as “Highly Cited Papers.” Articles published within the past two years that have received enough citations in WoS’s most recent bimonthly reporting period to place them in the top 0.1% when compared to other papers in the same field and added to the database in the same period are flagged as “Hot Papers.”

The “Analyze Results” tool will let you analyze your search results in greater detail and provides downloadable visualizations. For example, you can view the top institutions and journals publishing on a particular topic, or the top funding agencies. The tree map chart below displays the top 10 journal publishing articles about malaria during the past two years.

Drilling down into a specific a specific citation will let you see how many times it has been cited within journals indexed in WoS and view the citing articles. To receive email notifications whenever that a particular article has been cited, create a Citation Alert. In addition to citing articles, you can view the reference cited by the paper you are viewing. “View Related Records” will display other articles indexed in WoS that cite the same publications.

The “Comparison Metrics Panel” is a new feature that will show how the citation rate of a particular publication compares to others in the same field and in the same journal.

Another new feature is “Citing Items by Classification.” This tool displays how an article is mentioned in a paper when it is cited.

If you would like to learn more about Web of Science, attend our Measuring Impact: Web of Science workshop on November 19, or email a research librarian.