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Web of Science (WoS) is a multidisciplinary citation database that provides subscription-based access to several databases offering citation information for many different fields of sciencemultidisciplinary citation database. It was originally created by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and it is currently maintained by Clarivate Analytics. The WoS platform consists of several, separate multidisciplinary, field-specific and regional citation databases as well as patent and research information databases. All in all, the WoS databases hold 182 million 182 million records starting from the 19th the 19th century. The group A set of multidisciplinary journals, books and conference publications that have been , selected as globally most influential make up influental, form the Web of Science’s Science Core Collection database. The The Core Collection databases are also utilised as the base data of Clarivate Analytics’ InCites analysis tool and the Journal Citation Reports tool. This guide focuses in particular on the Web of Science Core Collection databases.
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WoS Core Collection comprises six separate databases (Figure 1), which include, in total, nearly 22,000 globally published high-quality scientific journals, more than 226,000 conference publications, and more than 126,000 editorially chosen books from the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, technology and arts (data from 2022). Clarivate sells separate licences for each database as well as separate retroactive material data packages for some of them. Temporal coverage is the highest for the materials of social and natural sciences; it is possible to license these materials starting from the early 20th century. The materials of arts and humanities start from 1975, conference publications from the 1990s, and monographs have been indexed since 2005. The client organisation may choose which citation databases and what kinds of a temporal coverage it wishes to include in its subscription. This should also be taken into account when carrying out bibliometric analyses. The number of publications listed in the search results depends on the licences used. However, the number of citations received by an article remains the same regardless of the extent of the subscription. In Finland, the FinElib consortium offers access to the key Core Collection indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Emerging Sources Citation Index. The materials requiring a separate subscription, i.e. Conference Proceedings Citation Index and Book Citation Index, are not covered by the FinElib licences.
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Every journal, conference publication and book in the Core Collection databases has been catalogued classified to one or more subject categories of a field of science (Web of Science Subject Categories). Each individual record holds information about the subject category of its source publication. There are about 250 subject 250 subject categories in total within natural and social sciences, arts and humanities. The classification has been formed by assigning each journal, book and conference publication one or more subject categories. Extensive fields of sciencesExtensive fields of sciences, such as physics, have been classified further into more specific subcategories, such as ‘Physics, applied’ and ‘Physics, nuclear’.
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In the WoS user interface, you start the search by first selecting the desired databases. You can use the same UI user interface to search all databases of the WoS product family. The Core Collection databases are most commonly used for publication metrics. Each record indexed in a Core Collection database includes the bibliographic information of the publication as well as information on all the article’s authors with their affiliations included, the abstract of the publication and its keywords (if included by the author), information about the funders of the publication and the grant numbers (if included) as well as accurate data on all the articles citing the publication. The Core Collection databases also comprise the base data of Clarivate Analytics’ InCites analysis tool and the Journal Citation Reports tool.
You can start your search by searching for documents, authors, or documents citing a specific publication (cited references). You can either use the basic search or an advanced search function. The advanced search allows the user to search for publications based on 35 different 35 different details, such as the publication’s title, DOI, author, researcher ID, subject, keywords reported by the author, grant number, funder and certain affiliations. The search fields can be combined with the help of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), and completed searches can also be combined further. The search results can also be filtered by the year of publication, publication type, WoS research area or the author’s affiliation, for example. The author search is still in its beta phase, but the function allows users to search for publications written by a certain person. The WoS algorithms aim to recognise publications belonging to a certain person by taking into account not only their name but also their affiliation information, publication history, the subject area of their publications, and other authors of their publications, as well as by utilising the researcher IDs maintained by the authors and the publications linked to these. The service function strives to improve the accuracy of the author search and author profiles by offering all registered users of the database the chance to rectify data – as opposed to just the authors themselves. Searching by cited references will bring up all documents citing a certain publication, including those that have not been indexed in the WoS databases.
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The search results from a WoS database can be analysed with the help of two different analysis toolsfunctions: Analyze Results and Citation Report.
The Analyze Results function is facilitated by the wide range of indexed fields in WoS. Among other aspects, this search result allows users to review the most commonly occurring countries, organisations or researchers, and the You can find out, for example, which countries, organizations or researchers appear most often in the search result set. The results can be grouped based on scientific fields of journals, publication types or research funders. The service offers a few different visualisation views to use, or the results can be downloaded for further processing in other software.
The Citation Report function brings together the total citation reports statistics of the search result. The report includes the following information:
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In addition to the researcher profiles, the WoS Core Collection databases allow for organisation-specific profiles to be maintained. Similarly to researchers, the names of organisations may change or the organisations may undergo structural changes. In the university sector in Finland, for example, Aalto University was formed by combining the independent institutes of the Helsinki School of BusinessEconomics; the School of Arts, Design and Architecture and The University of Art and Design Helsinki and Helsinki University of Technology, and the University of Eastern Finland was founded by combining the universities of Kuopio and Joensuu. The Core Collection databases feature Organization-Enhanced profiles, which are usually kept up to date by the specialists of the organisations’ scientific libraries. Keeping the organisation profiles of citation databases up to date is an important task, as this information is used for various benchmarking and collaboration analyses. Many ranking organisations also utilise this data. The organisation profiles of the InCites analysis tool based on the WoS Core Collection data have been created directly based on the Organization-Enhanced profiles.
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Clarivate has productised the WoS data also for several separate – and separately paid for – machine readable interfaces. The WoS access subscribed to by several Finnish organisations through the FinElib consortium only includes the most basic WoS API Lite and Links AMR interfaces. WoS API Expanded, which includes more extensive metadata on the publications, as well as citation numbers, for example, and the WoS Journals API, which include JIF Journal Impact Factor metrics, both require additional subscriptions.
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