Skip to Main Content

Web of Science

And other resources from Clarivate Analytics

Accessing WOS

  • Web of Science 
    Multidisciplinary coverage of over 10,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as published proceedings for over 12,000 conferences per year, and over 50,000 scholarly books. Allows searching for articles in the database that have cited a particular work, as well as perform other analytics.

Alternatively, Web of Science can be accessed by clicking the Top Databases link in the Popular Links menu on the left side of the Galter Library home page. In the next page, click the Web of Science link to access the database. 

Searching WOS

Basic Search: topic, author, journal name, etc. This is the default search in Web of Science. To select other types of searches, toggle between the tabs listed next to Basic Search, or click 'More' to view additional options.

To run a basic search:

  • Enter your search terms in the text box. Use asterisks (*) at the ends of words for truncation to allow for multiple word forms. 
  • Use the drop-down arrowhead in the box next to the text box to change from Topic to Author, Title and many other search field options
  • If you want to search multiple fields, click the blue text link to Add Another Field
  • When you have entered all your terms, click the Search button

 

In Author Search, Web of Science guides you through a series of steps to find a set of publications by a single author. To view the Author Search option, click 'More' and then choose 'Author Search.'

To search for an author:

  • Enter the author's last name and first initial in the boxes provided. Last name is required.
  • If there is a possibility that the author has been published using mre than one variant of first and second initials, click the blue text link to Add Author Name Variant to create more lines for all possible author name combinations
  • You have the option to click a checkbox for Exact Matches Only, but this will restrict your search to only that combination of last name and initial(s)
  • Click the button to Select Research Domain (alternately, you can click Finish Search)

Note: If you are searching for an author with a common last name such as Smith, Lee, Liu, etc., you will most likely want to use the options to specify research domain and organization to avoid an unmanageable number of results.

The Web of Science database indexes not only a particular article's citation information, but also records the article's bibliography. A document indexed within the citation database enables its historical origin (the cited references) to be examined and also to easily follow links through to its current position in the research literature (times cited). Cited reference searching allows you to find out who is citing your research, to track the research activities of known authors, and to follow the history of a topic.

Advanced Search allows you to use field tags to construct complex searches. Web of Science does not have a controlled vocabulary. This means you must plan your searches more precisely and think of synonyms or different ways to express the same concept.