Libraries

BML Database Guides: Web of Science

Web of Science covers all scholarly disciplines and can be used in two ways:

  1. General Search: search by topic, author, etc., like any other article database.
  2. cited reference this is a unique search tool that lets you use a particular article or author as a starting point to see who has cited that work since it was published.

Years of coverage: 1955 to present. Updated weekly.
Subject coverage all scholarly disciplines - science, medicine, engineering, social sciences and humanities.
Types of content: journal articles. In the "cited reference" search, you can start with non-journal materials to see who has cited a particular book, report, etc., but the search results will be from journal articles.

Instructional Materials from the UC/UCSD Libraries:

From the vendor:

Tips and Tricks

  • Search Web of Science and BIOSIS at the same time! Use the pulldown at the very top of the screen to select "Cross Search." You will get results from both databases combined.
  • Extremely prolific or highly-cited authors can be a problem in cited reference searching, where you might run into a system limit on "citing" paper matches. You may have to break the search down into pieces. A good way of doing this is to include year limits in your cited reference search. So for example, you might search cited author west jb and cited year 1991-1995.

For EndNote Users
Web of Science supports both direct exporting of citations as well as EndNote's own Connect tool. The Export function was recently changed and may "trip" your browser's security settings. Look for a warning message from your browser if the export process doesn't work as expected. Note: using the Connect tool you can only do General (ie, author or topic) searches, not Cited Reference searches.

For RefWorks Users
Save your desired results to your computer using the Tagged format. In RefWorks, use the References/Import function to import them into your RefWorks library. Choose Import Filter/Data Source: ISI and Database: Web of Science.
Alternative: if you are working on a computer where you cannot download files, you can e-mail the records to yourself from ISI, choosing the Tagged format and Plain Text formatting. You can then copy and paste the body of the e-mail into the Import tool in Refworks, in the lower box marked "Import Data from the following Text."