Subject Focus
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Science, Technology,
Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities
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Science, Technology, Medical, Engineering, Arts & Humanities |
Medical, Scientific, Technical, Business,
Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities |
| Components |
Composed of 5 citation indexes:
- Science Citation Index Expanded — back to 1900
- Social Sciences Citation Index – back to 1900
- Arts & Humanities Citation Index – back to 1975
- Conference Proceedings Citation Index -- back to 1990
- Book Citation Index -- back to 2005
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- Life Sciences, 4,150 titles
- Health Sciences, 6,400 titles (including 100% coverage of Medline titles)
- Physical Sciences, 6,900 titles
- Social Sciences, 6,800 titles, including 4,000 Arts & Humanities, titles, the majority of which go back to 2002
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- Selections from PubMed, IEEE, American Institute of Physics, proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature.com, American Medical Association and other medicine journals, Ingenta, SpringerLink, Wiley Interscience, Cambridge journals, Taylor and Francis, Sage Publications, Blackwell-Synergy, OCLC First Search, and others
- Open access journals and pre-prints
- Online dissertations and theses
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| Coverage |
Over 12,000 journals |
19,400 active journals |
Unknown |
Time Span
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Some journal files going back to 1900; see above for more detail |
49 million records, of which
- 28 million records include references going back to 1996 (78% include references)
- 21 million pre-1996 records go back as far as 1823
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Theoretically, whatever is available on the Internet |
| Updated |
Weekly |
1-2 Times a week |
Monthly on average |
| Strengths |
- Deeper back-files especially for Science Journals
- While controversial, its journal citation reports, impact factors, and h-index are the most widely used
- More focused on U.S. research
- Offers citation mapping for visual presentation
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- User friendly search interface
- Broader coverage of journals (19, 400 versus 12,000 in WOS)
- Downloadable reference list
- More internationally focused than WOS
- Includes 1,900 Open Access journals
- Improved Arts & Humanities coverage
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- Provides a more comprehensive picture of scholarly impact as it indexes non-traditional sources not covered by WOS and Scopus
- Includes peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities, and other scholarly organizations
- Better coverage of newer materials than both WOS and Scopus
- International and multi-lingual coverage
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| Weaknesses |
- Can lead to low citation counts due to errors in citations provided by authors and different citation styles used by journals, leading to poor indexing (see this Web of Science Cited Reference Search tutorial for some workarounds)
- Back-files are expensive
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- Citation tracking is limited to the relatively narrow time span of 1996+
- Not very strong in Social Sciences
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- Limited search features
- Inflated citation counts due to inclusion of non-scholarly sources such as newspaper articles, promotional pages, table of contents pages, and course readings lists
- Weeding irrelevant hits is time consuming
- Difficult to export citations
- No way to determine what sources and time spans are covered
- Limited to what is available on the Internet
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