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Web of Knowledge Search Tips and Information
Tip:
Use EndNote Web und ResearcherID in combination with Web of Knowledge!
| Web of Knowledge: General | ||
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Web of Knowledge is a portal that provides access to several multidisciplinary databases (Web of Science (WoS)) as well as the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and diverse smaller tools and resources. Once you have entered the WoK you can select All Databases for a cross search or Select a database for a more specific search. Please use WoS only with standard browsers (e.g. IE, Mozilla, Iceweasel)! | |
| Web of Science (WoS): Topic Coverage | ||
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The Web of Science contains publications from natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, which are covered by the Science Citation Index (from 1900), the Social Sciences Citation Index (from 1956), the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (from 1975), and, since now, Conference Proceedings Science/Social Science & Humanities (from 1992), respectively. You can select each of them or search them alltogether by Change Limits and Settings . Institutional affiliations are plotted since 1973 and abstracts are indexed since 1991. There is no further differentiation to subjects nor indexing; but you can search for keywords. The WoS contains article references mostly from English journals. More seldomly journals in other languages are indexed, too. | |
| WoS: Citation Network | ||
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You can search by author, title and topics (amongst other categories). The topic search is based on words from titles, abstracts as well as keywords provided by the authors. The references of all articles within the WoS are parsed and analyzed automatically and are then linked to the appropriate metadata of the publication (Citation Linking). As a result, a network of articles, which are linked by there citations, evolves. You can get for each article: | |
| References | a list of citations/bibliography. | |
| Times Cited | a list of publications which has been cited this article. | |
| Related Records | a list of similar records based on shared references and are ranked by the amount of common references. | |
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Times Cited is an important indicator of a publication`s imapct in the global scientific community. Citation Linking (comprising Times Cited, References and Related Records) allows you to broaden your initial results by those articles which are not found by keyword search, but are also relevant for your topic. This indirect thematic search option can be seen as alternative approach that amends searching in intellectually indexed subject databases. WoS is still the most famous database for measuring citations. The menu Cited Reference Search complies with the References-option of the basic search interface. It is also possible to search for articles which are citing articles which are themselves not in the WoS. | |
| WoS: Search for Authors | ||
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Only initials of the first name(s) are searchable in WoS. A truncation (*) after the first initial is mostly advisable. Names with special characters and compound names are problematic: In these cases you should include several spellings, i.e. search entry for Stefan Kölsch: Kolsch S* or Koelsch S*; search entry for Julius Wagner-Jauregg: Wagner-Jauregg J* or Wagnerjauregg J* or Wagner J* or Jauregg J* or Jaureg W*. There`s an Author Finder-option for more exact author mapping: This function lists existing variants of the the inserted family name and first name initial as well as, in a second step, all institutions associated with the given authors' and his co-authors` last name and initials. So, in case you know all institutions affiliated with a person you select those institutions and are able to perform a relatively well controlled author search. In each case you have to search all variants of authors` and institutions` names because of the fact that there is no standardization for these. | |
| WoS: Refine Your Search and Sort Your Results | ||
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Use the Refine Results -option (on the screens' left side) in order to filter your current results by criteria like Subject Areas, Document Types or Source Titles. Filter contents are dynamically generated on basis of the frequencies in the initial results, respectively. The Subject Areas that are based upon the Journal Subject Categories of WoS are a relatively general classification scheme of the scientific disciplines. You can Sort the results by different criteria like Times Cited, Relevance or First Author. | |
| WoS: Analyze Results and Create Citation Report | ||
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You can order and evaluate statistically results for Authors, Institution Names or Subject Areas with the help of the Analyze Results option. When searching for authors or institutions it may be useful to Create a Citation Report . This report shows you the absolute number of results, the absolute number of citations, the average number of citations for each article and each year as well as the h-index. Please contact or the for further information. | |
| Neu: Citation Map (Beta) | ||
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This feature offers a visualization to WoS citation analysis features. It displays a chosen record and its citing items (forward only), the record and its citations (backward only), or both. It`s possible to only include first-generation records which directly cite or are directly cited by the target record or second-generation records which, e.g., cite records that cite the target record. Interesting functions in the "Appearance" menu include the option to order the nodes by, e.g., journal title or subject category and to color nodes by the same categories in order to visualize citation patterns , that is group together those nodes that share certain properties. By way of the time bar the structure can ce reduced to cover a certain *timespan*. Clicking and holding the left mouse key allows to drag the map around the screen to make sections of it more legible. A node`s details as well as a link to the source record if available can be obtained by doubleclicking. The beta version don`t work with all browsers. This is a nice tool in order to explore more about citation relations. | |
| WoS: Combine Searches | ||
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It is possible to combine the result lists of different search queries. Click on the Search History button at the upper of the screen, select the result sets you want to combine and choose AND or OR. Click the Combine button to execute your search. | |
| WoS: AutoAlert Service | ||
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It is possible to save your search strategy. You will be sent e-mails or RSS regularly containing new articles which match your search criteria. You will need to create a personal login to use this feature. Click on the Save History / Create Alert button located under the Search History text menu. In the Complete Reference display you can create Citation Alert to an individual article. So you will receive an e-mail or RSS each time an article on the list (Times Cited) is cited in a new article. Please note that the alerting option is only available at Web of Science , not the comprehensive Web of Knowledge search interface. | |
| WoS: Export (Endnote) | ||
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On top of the result list you`ll find the "Save to EndNote, RefMan, ProCite" option. The marked references will be exported with abstracts (and without cited references) and save as .cgi-file. If Endnote is installed directly on Windows , Endnote will open automatically. If you are currently working on a Linux system, you have to open Endnote with Metaframe , you have to import them into Endnote. Select a Reference Library in Endnote to which you want to import these records. As Import Option select Other filters and choose ISI-CE. | |
| Searching WoS from Endnote | It is also possible to search WoS from Endnote and import references directly: Just click Tools/Online Search in Endnote and choose Web of Science. You can search author names, title and keywords. You may refine your search by Year. Please note: this is not the publication year, but the year whithin the articles were indexed in WoS (identical to Timespan-search of WoS). | |
| Journal Citation Reports: Tips and Information | ||
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The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) present statistical data gathered by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). These data can be used in order to evaluate leading scientific journals of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The JCR contains the following indices: Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, Cited Half-Life and Citing Half-life. The Impact Factor is the most well known index for the importance of a journal to its field. It is calculated in the following way: the number of times articles published in a two-year-period in a journal were cited by all in the following year is divided by the number of articles published in that journal in the two-year-period. The Immediacy Index gives the average citation number of an article in that year. The Cited Half-life gives the median age of the articles that were cited in Journal Citation Reports each year. For example, if a journal's half-life in 2005 is 5, that means the citations from 2001-2005 are 50% of all the citations from that journal in 2005. There are the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) | |
| WebPlus | ||
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WebPlus is designed to be a scientific web search engine. By clicking the WebPlus link on top of the results list WoK/WoS searches can be processed in WebPlus, too. The search engine is based on individually chosen news sites, blogs, journal homepages and repositories and has some typcial Web 2.0 features like user rankings, tagging and bookmarking. Filter options contain top level domains, document types and subjects. In contrast to the announcement, results are partly non-scientific, besides few and partly out-dated. Relevance ranking doesn't really work yet. Records from relevant repositories like ArXiv, PubMedCentral, CiteSeer and CogPrints are only found very seldomly, so repositories are not completely covered. Up to now, this is quite premature and not advisable. | |
| EndNote Web and ResearcherID | ||
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The online version of the bibliographic management software EndNote and the interface ResearcherID are from the Web of Knowledge out available. For this, the same login as for the WoK itself can be used. Use EndNote Web to store and manage all your references. All references originally from the WoK remain linked, so you are able to view e.g. "Related Records". ResearcherID assigns researchers to a unique identification number. On the platform you can set up a personal profile and create a list of your publications. The publications can be searched in Web of Science or imported from a file in the RIS format. For the publications, which are included in Web of Science, bibliometric indicators such as average citation rate and h-index can be determined. Both the information in the profile and the desired publication list are public or invisible. | |
| Legal Stuff | ||
| It is prohibited to use programs, scripts and commands, which interfere with/create an User`s Session, in order to send automatized queries. Please find the complete terms and conditions here. Please ask if you have any questions regarding legal issues! | ||
| Further information | ||
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Web of Knowledge Page of the Information Retrieval Services for the Institutes of the Bio.-Med. Section of the MPG | |
| Online Workshops of the IVS-BM | ||
| Homepage of the IVS-BM | ||
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Last update: Apr 8, 2011 11.43.42 am
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2011
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences