Dialog, UA Faculty and Staff News

Web of Science Provides Research Abilities

Web of Science logo The University Libraries has recently acquired a major database to support the research of faculty, students and staff. Web of Science is the online version of three major academic indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index. This extensive collection of bibliographic information is gathered from some 8,500 scholarly journals and makes it all available at one source.

With Web of Science’s 1.1 million records and more than 23 million cited references per year, researchers can search for specific articles by subject, author, journal and author address. It also provides a special search method -- cited reference searching. Researchers can conduct multidisciplinary searches across more than 230 disciplines in a moment.

Web of Science allows users to search backward in time using cited references to see what research influenced the author’s work and forward in time using Times Cited to see what impact a paper has had on current research. It can search the current week’s update, the latest two weeks, four weeks, individual years or all available years. The University Libraries provides access to indexed items from 1992 to current works.

Other features include Related Records, which locates articles that have cited references in common; Times Cited, which is updated weekly and provides users with a list of articles that cite the source article; and KeyWords Plus, which increases the likelihood of relevant hits. It also provides access to all significant items within the journal covered, including bibliographies, book reviews, editorials, letters, meeting abstracts and much more.

UA faculty members are already finding Web of Science useful to their work. "Web of Science’s capacity to look up ‘related records’ based on citations means that one not only finds a given set of articles ... but one can also see who is working with similar sources," said Dr. Ted Miller, assistant professor in the department of political science. The Web of Science is now seen as an indispensable tool at major research institutions, and I believe that many faculty and graduate students will be well served by it."

Dr. Carl Stock, professor of paleontology in the department of geological sciences, has found the Web of Science to be a much quicker way of finding his own and others’ publications "compared to the old Science Citation Index."

For more information about Web of Science and other databases and indexes, contact Pat Henderson, collection management coordinator and assistant professor in University Libraries, at 348-1491.