 | |
| Producer | Clarivate |
|---|---|
| History | 1997; 29 years ago (1997) |
| 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 | Articles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, proceedings (journals and book-based), technical papers |
| Temporal coverage | 1900–present |
| No. of records |
|
| Links | |
| Website | clarivate |
TheWeb of Science (WoS; previously known asWeb of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that provides (typically via the internet) access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data fromacademic journals,conference proceedings, and other documents in variousacademic disciplines.
Until 1997, it was originally produced by theInstitute for Scientific Information.[1] It is currently owned byClarivate.[2]
Web of Science currently contains 79 million records in the core collection and 171 million records on the platform.[3]
Acitation index is built on the fact that citations in science serve as linkages between similar research items, and lead to matching or related scientific literature, such asjournal articles,conference proceedings, abstracts, etc. In addition, literature that shows the greatest impact in a particular field, or more than one discipline, can be located through a citation index. 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.Eugene Garfield, the "father of citation indexing of academic literature",[4] who launched theScience Citation Index, which in turn led to the Web of Science,[5] wrote:
Citations are the formal, explicit linkages between papers that have particular points in common. A citation index is built around these linkages. It lists publications that have been cited and identifies the sources of the citations. Anyone conducting a literature search can find from one to dozens of additional papers on a subject just by knowing one that has been cited. And every paper that is found provides a list of new citations with which to continue the search.The simplicity of citation indexing is one of its main strengths.[6]
Expanding the coverage of Web of Science, in November 2009 Thomson Reuters introducedCentury of Social Sciences. This service contains files which trace social science research back to the beginning of the 20th century,[7] and Web of Science now has indexing coverage from the year 1900 to the present.[8][9] As of February 2017, the multidisciplinary coverage of the Web of Science encompasses: over a billion cited references, 90 million records, covering over 12 thousand high impact journals, and 8.2 million records across 160 thousand conference proceedings, with 15 thousand proceedings added each year.[10] The selection is made on the basis ofimpact evaluations and compriseacademic journals, spanning multipleacademic disciplines. The coverage includes: thesciences,social sciences,the arts, and humanities, and goes across disciplines.[8][11] However, Web of Science does not index all journals.
There is a significant and positive correlation between theimpact factor andCiteScore. However, an analysis byElsevier, who created the journal evaluation metric CiteScore, has identified 216 journals from 70 publishers to be in the top 10 percent of the most-cited journals in their subject category based on the CiteScore while they did not have an impact factor.[12] It appears that the impact factor does not provide comprehensive and unbiased coverage of high-quality journals. Similar results can be observed by comparing the impact factor with theSCImago Journal Rank.
Furthermore, as of September 2014, the total file count of the Web of Science was over 90 million records, which included over 800 million cited references, covering 5.3 thousand social science publications in 55 disciplines.[11]
Titles of foreign-language publications are translated into English and so cannot be found by searches in the original language.[13]
In 2018, the Web of Science started embedding partial information about theopen access status of works, usingUnpaywall data.[14]
While marketed as a global point of reference, Scopus and WoS have been characterised as "structurally biased against research produced in non-Western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities, and social sciences".[15]
After the2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 11 March 2022, Clarivate – which owns Web of Science – announced that it would cease all commercial activity in Russia and immediately close an office there.[16]
TheWeb of Science Core Collection consists of six online indexing databases:[17][18]
Since 2008, the Web of Science hosts a number of regional citation indices:
The sevencitation indices listed above contain references which have been cited by other articles. One may use them to undertake cited reference search, that is, locating articles that cite an earlier, or current publication. One may search citation databases by topic, by author, by source title, and by location. Two chemistry databases,Index Chemicus andCurrent Chemical Reactions allow for the creation of structure drawings, thus enabling users to locatechemical compounds and reactions.
The following types of literature are indexed: scholarly books,peer reviewed journals, original research articles, reviews, editorials, chronologies, abstracts, as well as other items. Disciplines included in this index areagriculture,biological sciences,engineering, medical andlife sciences,physical andchemical sciences,anthropology, law,library sciences,architecture, dance, music, film, and theater. Seven citation databases encompasses coverage of the above disciplines.[9][10][30]
Among other WoS databases areBIOSIS andThe Zoological Record, anelectronic index of zoological literature that also serves as the unofficial register of scientific names inzoology.
Clarivate owns and markets numerous other products that provide data and analytics, workflow tools, and professional services to researchers, universities, research institutions, and other organizations, such as:[31]
EndNote is a commercialreference management software package, used to managebibliographies andreferences when writing essays, reports and articles.
EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio) is a freely availableplugin allowing researchers to access papers in subscription-basedscientific journals, to which they are subscribed through theirhigher education libraries, even when the user is off-campus. The tool works by recording the institutional subscriptions each user has and searches for full-text versions of selected papers to which the user may have access.[32][33]
Publons was a commercial website that provided a free service for academics to track, verify, and showcase theirpeer review and editorial contributions foracademic journals. It was launched in 2012, bought byClarivate in 2017 and merged into Web of Science in 2022. It claimed that over 3,000,000 researchers joined the site, adding more than one million reviews across 25,000 journals.[34][35][36] In 2019,ResearcherID was integrated with Publons.[37]
As with other scientific approaches,scientometrics andbibliometrics have their own limitations. In 2010, a criticism was voiced pointing toward certain deficiencies of thejournal impact factor calculation process, based on Thomson Reuters Web of Science, such as: journal citation distributions usually are highly skewed towards established journals; journal impact factor properties are field-specific and can be easily manipulated by editors, or even by changing the editorial policies; this makes the entire process essentially non-transparent.[38]
Regarding the more objective journal metrics, there is a growing view that for greater accuracy it must be supplemented witharticle-level metrics and peer-review.[38] Studies of methodological quality and reliability have found that "reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank".[39] Thomson Reuters replied to criticism in general terms by stating that "no one metric can fully capture the complex contributions scholars make to their disciplines, and many forms of scholarly achievement should be considered."[40]
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is anannual publication byClarivate.[41] It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from theWeb of Science Core Collection. It provides information aboutacademic journals in thenatural andsocial sciences, includingimpact factors.JCR was originally published as a part of theScience Citation Index. Currently, theJCR, as a distinct service, is based oncitations compiled from theScience Citation Index Expanded and theSocial Sciences Citation Index.[42] As of the 2023 edition, journals from theArts and Humanities Citation Index and theEmerging Sources Citation Index have also been included.[43]