| Producer | Thomson Reuters (USA) |
|---|---|
| Access | |
| Providers | Various institutions and commercial organizations |
| Coverage | |
| Disciplines | Science, social science, arts, humanities (supports 256 disciplines) |
| Record depth | citation indexing, author, topic title, subject keywords, abstract, periodical title, author's address, publication year |
| Format coverage | full text articles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, proceedings (journals and book-based ), technical papers |
| Temporal coverage | 1900 to present |
| Geospatial coverage | Global - international |
| Number of records | 40.1 million + |
| Links | |
Web of Science is an online academic citation index provided by Thomson Reuters: It is designed for providing access to multiple databases, cross-disciplinary research, and in-depth exploration of specialized subfields within an academic or scientific discipline. As a citation index, any cited paper will lead to any other literature (book, academic journal, proceedings, etc.) which currently, or in the past, cites this work. In addition, literature which shows the greatest impact in a field covered by Web of Science, or more than one discipline, can be selectively obtained. 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. Web of Science has indexing coverage from the year 1900 to the present.[1][2]
Contents |
The multidisciplinary coverage encompasses 11,261 journals (September 5, 2009) selected on the basis of impact evaluations. This selection includes Open access journals and over 12,000 conferences each year (2009), spanning multiple academic disciplines. Coverage includes the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, and across disciplines.[1][3] Web of Science does not cover all journals, and its coverage in some fields is less complete than in others.
Furthermore, as of September 5, 2009 the total file size for Web of Science is 46.1 million records, which includes 727,549,189 cited references (July 2009). This database records 65 million citations are attributed to its contents, per year. Finally, it is described as the largest accessible citation database.[3]
Titles of foreign-language publications are translated into English and so cannot be found by searches in the original language.[4]
The following types of literature are indexed: peer reviewed journals, original research articles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, as well as other areas. 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. Six citation databases encompasses coverage of the above disciplines.[2][5]
Web of Science has six available databases:[5]
The six citation indices listed above contain references which have been cited by other articles. One may use such citations to undertake cited reference searching, that is, locating articles which cite an earlier, or current publication. One may also search citation databases by topic, by author, by source title, and by address. Two chemical databases, Index Chemicus and Current Chemical Reactions allow for the creation of structure drawings, thus enabling users to locate chemical compounds and reactions.
Institutions such as universities and the research departments of large corporations, generally access the Web of Science from the Web of Knowledge index.
Expanding the coverage of Web of Science in November 2009, Thomson Reuters introduced, or established, Century of Social Sciences. This service contains files which trace social science research back to the year 1900.[6][7]
|
||||||||||||||||||||||