Lecture 16: Science Citation Index
Web of Science

• Search any or all three ISI Citation Databases simultaneously, over all their available years of electronic coverage.
• Use hyperlinks between records to navigate forward, backward or through the research literature using the unique links made possible only with citation data.
• Perform Related Records searches over the entire database at once (see below).
• Link to original article information when a cited reference of interest is found for those original articles covered by the database)
• Conduct cited reference searches on primary and secondary authors (for those references covered by the database)
• Receive weekly updates to "times-cited" information. Create alert searches by author, topic, cited reference or combinations of the above.

Using Web of Science

• Log onto Web of Science using the URL given above. There are links to WoS from the UCSB Library's InfoSurf Databases list and many subject guides.

• To begin your search, enter your term(s) on the "Search" window or select "Cited Reference Search" or "Advanced Search" options.
• You may narrow the search by selecting any combination of the three files (SCIE, AHCI, SSCI) that you wish to search by clicking on the "Change Limits and Settings" link. Most searches only need to be run in one file but some interdisciplinary fields (e.g. science policy, psychology of art, music and the brain) may benefit from searching multiple files.
• Then, you may select the chronological range to be searched. The default is to search all available years. To select specific years, first click on "Year", then select a year. For a range of years, use the "From" and "to" boxes. Note that not all years shown are available for all three files.

Search

• See the scrren image above: To enter a term for searching, select the search field desired (Topic, Title, Author, Group Author, Publication Name, Year Published, Address, Language or Document Type), then type in the term or terms you wish to search in the field. Up to three search term/field combinations may be used on the screen as is. If you need more, click the "Add Another Field" link.

  For examples, see specific types of searches below.

  • Topic
    • Topic searches will look for your terms in the title as well as the abstract and added keywords if available. Abstracts, keywords and KeywordsPlus are only available from 1991 to present, so searches of earlier literature will search the article title only.
    • To search title words alone, select Title as your field.
    • Examples:
      • nuclear quadrupole resonance -- will search for that exact phrase
      • nuclear and quadrupole and magnetic and resonance -- will search for those four terms in any combination
      • brief history of time will find any phrase beginning with "brief history" and ending with "time" with up to one words in between.
      • child* and abus* will search for any combination of child, children, etc. and abuse, abuses, abusive, etc.
      • analys?s same (buckminsterfuller* or fuller*) will search for any combination of analysis or analyses with buckminsterfullerene, fullerene, fullerenes, fulleranes, fullerites, etc. in the same sentence.
      • plasma not blood will search for any records containing the word plasma but excluding the word blood.
  • Author
    • Author names are listed with last name first, followed by first initial and middle initials if present. Examples: KOHN W, BRUICE PY, KEATING HRF
    • To verify author names, click on the magnifying glass icon next to the Author field box and browse the list of authors in the database.
    • To search for authors whose first name is unknown, just enter the last name. Where the first initial is known, but the middle initial is unknown or possibly not used, use the asterisk. Example: BRUICE P*
    • SCI lists all authors of a paper, so you can combine author names to home in on a co-authored paper. Example: WATSON and CRICK
    • Remember that more than one author may have the same last name and initials. In some cases you may want to throw in an address term or phrase, but be aware that this may exclude some papers you want.
    • Also remember that in some cases, one journal may use all of an author's initials, but another journal may use only the first initial.
    • Be careful with compound last names; they are usually run together without spaces or punctuation (but not always.)
    • With some ambiguous names, you may have to try different combinations of names and initials. Example, Uzonyi Kiss Sandor may be indexed as Uzonyi, KS Kiss, SU or Sandor, UK. This ambiguity happens most often with authors whose languages may list the family name first and the given name(s) second.
  • Group Author (Collective Authors)
    • Use this option to search for papers authored by a collective entity or a very large group of individual authors.
    • Words in this field are often highly abbreviated. Click the lind for "group author index" to browse the list and see proper formats for your desired group.
  • Publication Name (i.e., Journal Name)
    • This field in General Search uses the unabbreviated version of the journal title. However, the ISI version of the title may not be the same as the one you are familiar with. Consult the journal title list available from the magnifying glass link next to the "Publication Title" field box.
    • You may search by full title or by keywords from the title.
  • Address
    • Addresses are heavily abbreviated in WoS. Consult the help lists available linked from the search screen.
    • Remember that a set of terms may pull up more than one address: UNIV and CA and LOS ANGELES will pick up not only UCLA but also USC and Cal State - Los Angeles.
    • Similarly, names of departments can be ambiguous. Searching SANTA BARBARA and CHEM will pick up both the chemistry and chemical engineering departments of UCSB.

Cited Reference Search

• Like the print citation indexes, the basic cited reference index in WoS lists cited articles by the first author, journal title, volume, starting page and date of publication. The author, publication name, and publication date are searchable.
• Also like the print product, cited references are listed as they appear in the citing publication, with no effort to clear up errors introduced by the citing authors. As a result, the same cited article may be listed in several different ways.
• Web of Science has an advantage over print and CD-ROM in that cross-references have been created for source articles which are indexed in WoS, enabling one to locate some articles by the names of second, third, etc., authors.
• Searching for cited references is a two-step process.
  • First, enter your search terms (cited author, cited work, cited year) then click on Lookup. This will take you to a list of cited references which meet your criteria. The list is in alphabetical order, first by cited author, then by cited work, then in reverse chronological order. Note that the system will display a maximum of 500 cited references.
  • Note that "cited work" journal titles are heavily abbreviated. There is a linked list of abbreviations you can consult, but these abbreviations are not used consistently. Be careful when using a "cited work" search that you don't miss relevant possibilities.
  • Below is a page of the results from a search of "Bruice T*" as cited author and "1990-1992" as cited year.

• When you go to the Cited Reference Selection display, you may select which cited references you wish to search. References may be selected individually by clicking on the box to the left of the reference. Clicking the Select Page button selects all of the references on that page only. Select All selects the first 500 references in your lookup set.
• References on the Lookup display which have a "View Record" link have themselves been indexed in WoS. Clicking on the link will take you to the record for that document. Where the "View Record" link does not appear, it is usually because (a) the journal is not indexed by WoS, or (b) the citation is in some manner erroneous, so it did not link to the article intended.
• Note that some of the highlighted records may have an ellipsis appears in front of the name of the author. This signifies that the author searched is not the first author of the cited reference, but has been picked up by the WoS cross-reference feature.
• Note also that it is from this screen that you can apply language or document type limits to your Cited Reference search.
• When you have selected all the desired items, then click on the Finish Search button to carry out the search.

Search History

• The Search History screen allows you to view the search history of your session, including both General and Cited Reference searches.
• You may combine any searches shown by set number, selecting Boolean operators (AND, OR) and checking the desired searches.
• You may also delete unwanted searches from the history by marking them and clicking the Delete button at lower right.
• To jump to the results of any of your searches, including the results of combined searches, click on the highlighted number of results in the second column of appropriate row of the search history table.

Note that you must register an e-mail address and create a password in order to save search histories or create search alerts. (See under "Customization" above.) Having registered and logged in, you can now save or delete search histories, and create and manage search alerts.

Advanced Search

• The Advanced Search option allows you to search any of the fields in the General Search (Topic, Title, Author, Source, Address, etc.), combining search terms with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, SAME.
• Note that your Search History (if any) is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Previous searches may also be combined by using the # followed by the line number of the search.
• Advanced Search does not allow you to carry out Cited Reference Searches. However, if a Cited Reference search has already been done in the same session, you may combine it with other searches as described above.

Displaying Brief Results

• After you click on the Search button, you will be taken to a list of the brief records which match your search. Unless you have selected a different Sort option, records will be listed in reverse chronological order (most recent first). You may, however, select a different sort option from the drop-down list on the right hand side of the screen. "Times Cited" is the number of times the article has been cited by other articles in the database. This will somewhat bias the order toward older articles. "Relevance" lists the results in the order of the number of times your search terms appear in the bibliographic record, and so is only really effective for topic searches.
• To see the full record for an item, click on its highlighted title.
• To save or print a record or records, you may use the "Output Records" options on the top right-hand side or the bottom of the screen to print, e-mail or save to disk selected records, all the records on a page, or a numeric range of records. You may also export a set of records in the format used by bibliographic database software like "EndNote" or "ProCite", but this requires installing a separate plug-in.
• Alternatively, you can add desired records to a "Marked List". Records may be marked individually by clicking the box to the left of the brief record, or all records on a page may be marked with the All records on this page button, or up to the entire answer set with the range of records option. Then click the Add to Marked List button. Records from multiple pages of a given search or multiple searches within a given session can be put on a single Marked List for easy viewing and outputting. (see below.)
• You may move from page to page using the arrow and/or page number buttons at the top and bottom of each page. The total number of records in the answer set is given at both top and bottom of the page.

Full Record Display

• Each full record display shows the bibliographic information for the article (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages, and date; document type and language; abstract (if available); added keywords and author address information (including, for many recent records, e-mail information.)
• If the article has cited references, the number of references is given, with a hot link to the list of cited references on the lower right portion of the display.

• Above is a portion of the cited references from the paper above. Note that some cited references are hotlinked to the full record for the article cited. Click on the highlighted article title link to go to its full record.
• If the original article has itself been cited, there will be a Cited By section. Up to three citing articles are listed, with a hot link to complete list of records for the citing papers. (see below) Note that the list of Citing Articles may be Refined or Analyzed, just like the original answer set. To return to the original answer click the browser "Back" button, or the title of the original article above the top of the list.
• Note the "Create Citation Alert" button. Registered users can use this to easily create an alert that will notify them whenever a new article citing the given article enters the database.
  
  
  
  
• Note the UC e-Links button, common to many UC-subscribed databases, which provides a link to the MELVYL periodicals record for this journal, and, where possible, links to the electronic full-text of the article.
• You may mark or unmark records from this screen with the button at the left of the page, and jump directly to the previous or next record or back to the brief record list ("Summary").

Related Records - a novel approach to subject searching

• Each full record display that has cited references has a Related Records button.
• A Related Record is any record which shares at least one cited reference with the original source record. The more shared references, the more closely related the records are -- an extension of the notion of citation searching to track a subject area.
• Clicking on the Related Record button automatically searches all the cited references as an "OR"ed set; the results are then sorted to give the most relevant, i.e., most cited references in common, records first, up to 500 records.
• Note that the Related Records brief list has columns telling how many Cited References each Related Record has, and how many of those it shares in common with the original starting reference. Clicking on the number of shared references displays a list of the shared references, complete with their bibliographic information.
• Note that while a set of Related Records may be Refined, Analyzed, etc., Related Records searches are not listed in the Search History of your session.
• You may carry out Related Records searches several levels deep. The Search Results button at the top of the screen will return you to the starting record.
• To carry out a Related Records search on only selected cited references, go to the Cited References list for the parent record and unmark the records you do not wish to search on. Then click the Related Records button on that page.

• This option, located on the lower right hand side of the full record, is unique to the Thomson Scientific databases. It allows users who catch a mistake in the database to report it to the database producers for correction. While it is not directly part of the search process, it provides a valuable mechanism for cleaning up the database, which enhances searching for all users.

Log Out

• At the end of your session, be sure to click the Logo Out link at the top right of your screen. This frees up a port for other users, and closes your personal account if you have logged in.
• If you do not interact with the system, it will eventually automatically terminate your session. Be careful not to let your session expire in the middle of a search.