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Web of Science

Web of Science
ProducerClarivate
History1997; 27 years ago (1997)
Coverage
DisciplinesScience, social science, arts, humanities (supports 256 disciplines)
Record depthCitation indexing, author, topic title, subject keywords, abstract, periodical title, author's address, publication year
Format coverageArticles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, proceedings (journals and book-based), technical papers
Temporal coverage1900–present
No. of records
  • 79 million (core collection)
  • 171 million (platform)
Links
Websiteclarivate.com/products/web-of-science/
Logo in 2014

The Web of Science (WoS; previously known as Web of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that provides (typically via the internet) access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines.

Until 1997, it was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information.[1] It is currently owned by Clarivate.[2]

Web of Science currently contains 79 million records in the core collection and 171 million records on the platform.[3]

History

A citation index is built on the fact that citations in science serve as linkages between similar research items, and lead to matching or related scientific literature, such as journal articles, conference proceedings, abstracts, etc. In addition, literature that shows the greatest impact in a particular field, or more than one discipline, can be located through a citation index. For example, a paper's influence can be determined by linking to all the papers that have cited it. In this way, current trends, patterns, and emerging fields of research can be assessed. Eugene Garfield, the "father of citation indexing of academic literature",[4] who launched the Science Citation Index, which in turn led to the Web of Science,[5] wrote:

Citations are the formal, explicit linkages between papers that have particular points in common. A citation index is built around these linkages. It lists publications that have been cited and identifies the sources of the citations. Anyone conducting a literature search can find from one to dozens of additional papers on a subject just by knowing one that has been cited. And every paper that is found provides a list of new citations with which to continue the search. The simplicity of citation indexing is one of its main strengths.[6]

Search answer

Web of Science "is a unifying research tool which enables the user to acquire, analyze, and disseminate database information in a timely manner".[7] This is accomplished because of the creation of a common vocabulary, called ontology, for varied search terms and varied data. Moreover, search terms generate related information across categories.

Acceptable content for Web of Science is determined by an evaluation and selection process based on the following criteria: impact, influence, timeliness, peer review, and geographic representation.[8]

Web of Science employs various search and analysis capabilities. First, citation indexing is employed, which is enhanced by the capability to search for results across disciplines. The influence, impact, history, and methodology of an idea can be followed from its first instance, notice, or referral to the present day. This technology points to a deficiency with the keyword-only method of searching.[9][10]

Second, subtle trends and patterns relevant to the literature or research of interest, become apparent.[9][10] Broad trends indicate significant topics of the day, as well as the history relevant to both the work at hand, and particular areas of study.

Third, trends can be graphically represented.[8][11]

Coverage

Expanding the coverage of Web of Science, in November 2009 Thomson Reuters introduced Century of Social Sciences. This service contains files which trace social science research back to the beginning of the 20th century,[12][13] and Web of Science now has indexing coverage from the year 1900 to the present.[14][15] As of February 2017, the multidisciplinary coverage of the Web of Science encompasses: over a billion cited references, 90 million records, covering over 12 thousand high impact journals, and 8.2 million records across 160 thousand conference proceedings, with 15 thousand proceedings added each year.[16] The selection is made on the basis of impact evaluations and comprise academic journals, spanning multiple academic disciplines. The coverage includes: the sciences, social sciences, the arts, and humanities, and goes across disciplines.[14][17] However, Web of Science does not index all journals.

There is a significant and positive correlation between the impact factor and CiteScore. However, an analysis by Elsevier, who created the journal evaluation metric CiteScore, has identified 216 journals from 70 publishers to be in the top 10 percent of the most-cited journals in their subject category based on the CiteScore while they did not have an impact factor.[18] It appears that the impact factor does not provide comprehensive and unbiased coverage of high-quality journals. Similar results can be observed by comparing the impact factor with the SCImago Journal Rank.

Furthermore, as of September 2014, the total file count of the Web of Science was over 90 million records, which included over 800 million cited references, covering 5.3 thousand social science publications in 55 disciplines.[17]

Titles of foreign-language publications are translated into English and so cannot be found by searches in the original language.[19]

In 2018, the Web of Science started embedding partial information about the open access status of works, using Unpaywall data.[20]

While marketed as a global point of reference, Scopus and WoS have been characterised as «structurally biased against research produced in non-Western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities, and social sciences».[21]

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, on March 11, 2022, Clarivate – which owns Web of Science – announced that it would cease all commercial activity in Russia and immediately close an office there.[22]

Citation databases

Web of Science databases

The Web of Science Core Collection consists of six online indexing databases:[23][24]

  • Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), previously entitled Science Citation Index, covers more than 9,200 journals across 178 scientific disciplines. Coverage is from 1900 to present day, with over 53 million records[25]
  • Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) covers more than 3,400 journals in the social sciences. Coverage is from 1900 to present, with over 9.3 million records[26]
  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) covers more than 1,800 journals in the arts and humanities. Coverage is from 1975 to present, with over 4.9 million records[27]
  • Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) covers more than 7,800 journals in all disciplines. Coverage is from 2005 to present, with over 3 million records[28]
  • Book Citation Index (BCI) covers more than 116,000 editorially selected books. Coverage is from 2005 to present, with over 53.2 million records[29]
  • Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI) covers more than 205,000 conference proceedings. Coverage is from 1990 to present, with over 70.1 million records[30]

Regional databases

Since 2008, the Web of Science hosts a number of regional citation indices:

Contents

The seven citation indices listed above contain references which have been cited by other articles. One may use them to undertake cited reference search, that is, locating articles that cite an earlier, or current publication. One may search citation databases by topic, by author, by source title, and by location. Two chemistry databases, Index Chemicus and Current Chemical Reactions allow for the creation of structure drawings, thus enabling users to locate chemical compounds and reactions.

Abstracting and indexing

The following types of literature are indexed: scholarly books, peer reviewed journals, original research articles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, as well as other items. Disciplines included in this index are agriculture, biological sciences, engineering, medical and life sciences, physical and chemical sciences, anthropology, law, library sciences, architecture, dance, music, film, and theater. Seven citation databases encompasses coverage of the above disciplines.[15][16][36]

Other databases and products

Among other WoS databases are BIOSIS and The Zoological Record, an electronic index of zoological literature that also serves as the unofficial register of scientific names in zoology.

Clarivate owns and markets numerous other products that provide data and analytics, workflow tools, and professional services to researchers, universities, research institutions, and other organizations, such as:[37]

  • EndNote is a commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays, reports and articles.
  • EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio) is a freely available plugin allowing researchers to access papers in subscription-based scientific journals, to which they are subscribed through their higher education libraries, even when the user is off-campus. Using artificial intelligence, the tool automatically records the institutional subscriptions each user has and searches for full-text versions of selected papers to which the user may have access.[38][39]
  • Publons was a commercial website that provided a free service for academics to track, verify, and showcase their peer review and editorial contributions for academic journals. It was launched in 2012 and was bought by Clarivate in 2017. It claimed that over 3,000,000 researchers joined the site, adding more than one million reviews across 25,000 journals.[40][41][42] In 2019, ResearcherID was integrated with Publons.[43]
  • InCites
  • Journal Citation Reports
  • Essential Science Indicators
  • ScholarOne
  • Converis

Limitations in the use of citation analysis

Further information: Citation analysis and San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
See also: Impact factor § Criticism

As with other scientific approaches, scientometrics and bibliometrics have their own limitations. In 2010, a criticism was voiced pointing toward certain deficiencies of the journal impact factor calculation process, based on Thomson Reuters Web of Science, such as: journal citation distributions usually are highly skewed towards established journals; journal impact factor properties are field-specific and can be easily manipulated by editors, or even by changing the editorial policies; this makes the entire process essentially non-transparent.[44]

Regarding the more objective journal metrics, there is a growing view that for greater accuracy it must be supplemented with article-level metrics and peer-review.[44] Studies of methodological quality and reliability have found that "reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank".[45] Thomson Reuters replied to criticism in general terms by stating that "no one metric can fully capture the complex contributions scholars make to their disciplines, and many forms of scholarly achievement should be considered."[46]

Journal Citation Reports

This section is an excerpt from Journal Citation Reports.[edit]
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is an annual publication by Clarivate.[47] It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science Core Collection. It provides information about academic journals in the natural and social sciences, including impact factors. JCR was originally published as a part of the Science Citation Index. Currently, the JCR, as a distinct service, is based on citations compiled from the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index.[48] As of the 2023 edition, journals from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Emerging Sources Citation Index have also been included.[49]

See also

References

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  2. ^ "Acquisition of the Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property and Science Business by Onex and Baring Asia Completed" (Press release). Retrieved 13 December 2017 – via PR Newswire.
  3. ^ Matthews, Tracy (2016-11-11). "Web of Science platform: Web of Science: Summary of Coverage". LibGuides. Archived from the original on 2021-04-13. Retrieved 2021-04-17.
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  7. ^ "Bæb thds̄xb kār kĥn phb wĕb k̄hxng withyāṣ̄ās̄tr̒ 2018" แบบทดสอบการค้นพบเว็บของวิทยาศาสตร์ 2018 [Web of Science Discovery Quiz 2018]. Clarivate (in English and Thai). 2018. Archived from the original on 2021-06-13. Retrieved 2024-06-23. "Web of Science pĕn kherụ̄̀xng mụ̄x wicạy bæb khrb wngcr thī̀ ch̀wy h̄ı̂ p̄hū̂ chı̂ s̄āmārt̄h rạb wikherāah̄̒ læa p̄hey phær̀ k̄ĥxmūl ṭ̄hān k̄ĥxmūl dị̂ thạn th̀wngthī." Web of Science เป็นเครื่องมือวิจัยแบบครบวงจรที่ช่วยให้ผู้ใช้สามารถรับ วิเคราะห์ และเผยแพร่ข้อมูลฐานข้อมูลได้ทันท่วงที. [Web of Science is a unifying research tool which enables the user to acquire, analyze, and disseminate database information in a timely manner.]
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  17. ^ a b "The Citation Connection - Real Facts - IP & Science". Thomson Reuters. Archived from the original on 2014-09-24. Retrieved 2014-09-03.
  18. ^ Tucker, David (2017-07-25). "CiteScore highlights top-cited journals neglected by other metrics". Elsevier. Archived from the original on 2017-07-27. Retrieved 2017-12-31.
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  20. ^ Else, Holly (2018-08-15). "How Unpaywall is transforming open science". Nature. 560 (7718): 290–291. Bibcode:2018Natur.560..290E. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-05968-3. PMID 30111793.
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  22. ^ Else, Holly (March 14, 2022). "Ukrainian researchers pressure journals to boycott Russian authors". Nature. 603 (7902): 559. Bibcode:2022Natur.603..559E. doi:10.1038/d41586-022-00718-y. PMID 35288680. S2CID 247452826.
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    - "Overview". Journal Citation Reports. Thomson Reuters. 2010. Archived from the original on 25 June 2010. Retrieved 25 June 2010.
    - "About Us". Thomson Reuters. 2010. Archived from the original on 1 January 2011. Retrieved 25 June 2010.
    - Venkatraman, Archana (September 2009). "Journals cherish IF status symbol: but impact factor is not the only citation metric that matters". Information World Review: 7.
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Further reading

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