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Web of Science

January 13, 1999 Author: CDLCategories:

Web of Science is composed of the three ISI Citation Databases that collectively index more than 8,400 high quality, peer-review journals cover-to-cover, providing users with complete bibliographic data, full-length author abstracts, and cited references from the world’s most influential journals.  Licensing of the Web of Science is due to successful “co-investment” of resources for the UC Community.  The general libraries share in the funding of WoS, along with the CDL.  Negotiations, including substantial discount pricing, were led by the CDL and Joint Steering Committee on Shared Collections member, Clint Howard at UC Davis.

The Science Citation Index Expanded covers over 5,600 journals (approximately 2,000 more titles than the print or CD-ROM version) and is updated with 16,000 new records every week.  The Social Sciences Citation Index covers 1,700 journals and is updated with 2,800 new records every week.  Additionally, items from over 7,000 leading science and social sciences journals are selectively included.  The Arts & Humanities Citation Index covers over 1,140 journals and is updated with 2,200 new records every week.  Additionally, items from over 5,600 leading science and technical journals are selectively included.

Through the Web of Science, these multidisciplinary databases may be searched independently or in any combination.  Users can perform current and retrospective searches of the files using Netscape or Internet Explorer.

Traditionally, researchers have used the citation indexes to search a relevant paper and find other, more recent papers that cite it.  The Web of Science enhances the power of cited reference searching by allowing researchers to:

  • navigate forward, backward, and through the research literature
  • link to original article information when a cited reference of interest is found (for original articles covered by the database)
  • locate all cited authors, not just first authors, for articles in the database
  • track “times cited” information for articles on a weekly basis
  • find relevant items which share one or more cited references, through the Related Records½ function
  • discover key papers by ranking found items by “times cited”

Web of Science is a sophisticated research vehicle, offering customized search options, expanded citation information (author’s abstracts and bibliography), and the option of saving queries for updates, printing, or exporting to bibliographic management software.