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Web of Science: Introduction

Web of Science

Welcome to our Web of Science guide.  Web of Science is a multidisciplinary citation and abstract database. It covers life sciences, biomedical sciences, engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities. As a citation database, it allows users to see how many times a paper/author has been cited and by whom. Web of Science also includes Journal Citation Reports (JCR), Incites and Essential Science Indicators, through the InCites platform. These are resources for identifying journal impact factors and institutional performance ranking.

 Use Web of Science to:

  • Create customised searches for peer-reviewed literature across many disciplines
  • View citation records to journal articles
  • Access the full text of documents provided by subscriptions through DCU Library
  • View profiles for authors indexed by Web of Science, which include measures of scholarly impact like h-index and publication counts   
  • View affiliation profiles indexed by Web of Science, for information such as institutional output and collaborations

Web of Science is useful for searching for literature that can help you with your research and determining the impact of scholarly works. 

What's an abstract and citation database?

Web of Science is an abstract and citation database.

* Abstracts are brief synopses of articles.

* A citation gives credit to a source, and contains publication information such as author(s), title and date.

Most Web of Science citations link to the full-text version of the publication hosted on various publishers' platforms.

 

 

Web of Science Collection

How big is Web of Science?

Web of Science Core Collection has: 

  • Over 82 million records
  • More than 126,000 books
  • Over 226,000 conferences covered

The Web of Science Plaform has:

  • 182 million records (journals, books, and proceedings)
  • 49 million patent families (> 99 million patents)
  • 11 million data sets

FAQ

Web of Science Platform 

Training Resources