Introduction to Web of Knowledge

Web of Knowledge is a comprehensive research platform which includes Web of Science, BIOSIS, and Journal Citation Reports.

Web of Science is a citation index covering the Science Citation Index, the Social SciencesCitation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

The content ranges from 1900 to the present.

What is a citation index?

In addition to a standard bibliographic citation, a citation index includes the cited references of the items indexed.

That is, the number of times an article is cited will be shown, so you can go forward in time to find similar or related articles.

You can also search for a specific author to see how many times he or she has been cited.

Why use a citation index?

As mentioned above, using a citation index allows you to search forward in time. If you have a seminal paper on a topic, you can find out who is citing it and check those articles to see if they are relevant to your research.

You might find useful articles that you did not find in a search by topic.

If you are an author, you can see who has been citing your work.

Basic Searching

You can search for a subject, title of a publication, author, document type, etc.

Use keywords and Boolean operators (AND, OR, or NOT) for your topic (i.e., subject) search.

After entering your search terms, click Search. Once you get your results, you can refine, or limit, the results by clicking on the options on the toolbar on the left of the page.

Notice the varying results in the searches below. We are looking for articles dealing with galloping transmission lines.

In the first search, we have entered: gallop* transmission as our search terms. (The asterisk is the truncation symbol used in this database, so it will retrieve terms such as “gallop”, “galloping”, “galloped”, etc.)

This search gives us 187 results, many of which are not related to our topic at all.

The second search uses double quotation marks to indicate a phrase (“gallop* transmission”).

This search gives us 4 results, because it is looking only for that particular phrase.

The third search uses the Boolean operator “AND”, giving us 78 results, most of which appear to be relevant.

Click on the title of an article to view the full record, including the abstract (if there is one). The full record will also show you the number of times that article has been cited and the number of articles it used in its bibliography.

To see if full text is available, click the “Get it UTL” button. There are very few full text links in Web of Science, but once in a while you will find one.

You can check off the results that you are interested in and add them to “Marked List”.

You can then e-mail, print, or save the marked records, or export them to EndNote or Reference Manager. If you are using RefWorks, you must save the citations as a text file and then import them into your RefWorks account.

Doing a Cited Ref Search

Use the Cited Reference Search to find articles that cite a person’s work.

You will get a list of the journals the author published in, showing the number of citing articles from each. Ellipses indicate that the author was not the first author listed.

Sometimes you will find incomplete or erroneous information. For example, this author published an article in American Family Physician in 1979, but there are 2 different entries, both with the same start page.

You can click on specific journals or years or select all citations. Then click “Finish Search”.

To eliminate self-citations, do a basic search for the author, then go to your search history. You will have 2 searches: one for the cited refs and one for articles the author has written.

Now click on Advanced Search and type #1 NOT #2 into the search box. Scroll down to your search history to see the final number of articles that cited the author, but not including his own work. Click on the number to see the citations.

“Analyze Results” and “Create Citation Report”

When you do a general search in Web of Science for a subject or an author, you will see “Analyze Results” and “Create Citation Report” links to the right of your results list.

In this example, we’ve done a subject search for “tar sands”.

Clicking on “Analyze Results” gives you options on how to display the results:

Analysing by country in this example indicates that US journals have published 123 or the 332 articles found on tar sands, Canadian journals have published 119 articles, etc., so you can see the trends of what is being published where.

You can also rank the results by author, to see who has been publishing the most articles on a specific topic.

Clicking on “Create Citation Report” gives you a breakdown of the number of items published each year over the past 20 years and the total number of times all the articles in your results list were cited during the past 20 years. You also get the average number of times an item has been cited. (You can change the graphs to display all years if desired.)

The Published Items in Each Year graph shows which years produced the largest number of articles in your search results (and which years produced the smallest number).

The Citations in Each Year graph shows how many citations were made to any of the articles in your search results set. It shows which years produced the largest number of citing articles, and which years produced the smallest number.

Scroll down the page to get a list of the articles from your search results showing the number of times each article was cited per year. The default display is by “Times Cited”. You can change the display to list by publication date, first author, source journal, etc.

You can also do a citation report for authors.

The “h-index” is based on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the number of times cited. The value of h is equal to the number of papers (N) in the list that have N or more citations. In this example, the author’s h-index is 19, so he has 19 articles that have been cited at least 19 times.

Journal Citation Reports

Journal Citation Reports is published annually and contains data from over 5900 journals in science and technology and from over 1700 journals in the social sciences.

JCR gives you the number of articles published in a particular journal for a specific year, the number of citations to that journal from articles published in that year, the impact factor for that journal for that year, etc.

You can search by subject area, by the title of a specific journal, or look at all journals covered in JCR. You must choose either the Science or the Social Science edition of JCR.

One common request at the reference desk is for the impact factor of a journal. The journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year.

For example, in the 2008 edition of JCR, Age & Ageing has an impact factor of 3.052. This is calculated by dividing the number of citations in that JCR year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. Here, the impact factor means that, on average, articles published in 2006-2007 have been cited a little over 3 times.

The Immediacy Index is the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations to articles published in a given year by the number of articles published in that year. In this example, Age & Ageing has an immediacy index of .598 for 2008.

You can change the sorting order. Here, the journals are listed by impact factor.

Thomson Reuters has excellent webinars from time to time. Check their schedule at http://wokinfo.com/training_support/training/livetraining/