1.3.2 Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge

Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge is a collection of databases and analytical tools relating to bibliographic and citation analysis. The two best known are the Journal Citation Reports and the Web of Science.

• The Journal Citation Reports focus on the citation impact of journals and are discussed in Section 1.4.1.
• The Web of Science is most often used to search for publications and citations for individual academics and will be discussed in more detail below.

The Web of Science

The Web of Science is generally known as ISI Web of Science or ISI. This is the traditional source of citation data, established by Eugene Garfield in the 1960s. Many universities still use this as their only source of citation data. It charges commercial rates for access and is generally updated once or twice a week.

The Web of Science has complete coverage of citations in the more than 11,000 journals that are ISI listed, going back to 1900. However, it only covers around 2,700 journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Although its worldwide coverage has been improving recently, it still has a North American bias in many disciplines.

The Web of Science has two main ways to search for citation data, the ISI Search and the ISI Cited Reference Search. The ISI Search function is the standard function selected when logging into the Web of Science. It has more extensive analytical functions than the Cited Reference Search, but has a more limited coverage of citations. The difference in coverage between the two functions is as follows:

• ISI Search = only includes citations IN ISI-listed journals TO publications ISI-listed journals. Only citations that refer accurately to the ISI Master record for the publication in question are included (see Chapter 14 for more details).
• ISI Cited by search = includes citations IN ISI-listed journals TO all publications (incl. non ISI-listed journals, books, conference papers, white papers, government reports). Citations that refer to a publication with small errors (stray citations) are reported separately. Please note that even in the “cited by” search function ISI ignores citations for second and further authors for non-ISI publications.