Web of Science as a Data Source for Research on Scientific and Scholarly Activity
Open accessAbstract
Web of Science (WoS) is the world’s oldest, most widely used and authoritative database of research publications and citations. Based on the Science Citation Index, founded by Eugene Garfield in 1964, it has expanded its selective, balanced, and complete coverage of the world’s leading research to cover around 34,000 journals today. A wide range of use cases are supported by WoS from daily search and discovery by researchers worldwide through to the supply of analytical data sets and the provision of specialized access to raw data for bibliometric partners. A long- and well-established network of such partners enables the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to continue to work closely with bibliometric groups around the world to the benefit of both the community and the services that the company provides to researchers and analysts.
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WoS offers several different API types, but access to them has to be acquired separately with additional conditions for use.
“Meanwhile, WoS offers several different API types, but access to them has to be acquired separately with additional conditions for use [28,218].”
From Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World (2021) · cites this paper as [218]
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Cites
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Flagged first, then by citations
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- Authors
- Birkle, C., Pendlebury, D. A., Schnell, J., & Adams, J.
- Affiliations
- Institute for Scientific Information, Web of Science Group, 160 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8EZ, UK
- Corresponding author
- Adams, Jonathan
- Venue
- Quantitative Science Studies
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Published
- 2020-02
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 363-376
- ISSN
- 2641-3337 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3000895385
- Cited by
- 1,283
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 275 · 2025: 338 · 2024: 288 · 2023: 179 · 2022: 123 · 2021: 64 · 2020: 16
- FWCI
- 58.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Quantitative Science Studies (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Keywords
- Web of Science, bibliometric data sources, Science Citation Index, citation data, Institute for Scientific Information
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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