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Web of Science: Basics and More

This guide provides an overview of Web of Science

Quick Filter Icons

Icon

Filter Option Description
highly cited in field icon Highly Cited Papers Highly cited papers that received enough citations as of November/December 2019 to place them in the top 1% of their academic fields based on a highly cited threshold for the field and publication year.
hot paper in field icon Hot Paper in Field

Hot Papers were published in the past two years and received enough citations in November/December 2019 to place them in the top 0.1% of papers in its academic fields.

Associated data icon Associated Data

Articles with associated data mention a data set, data study, or data repository in the Data Citation Index that may be accessed for potential re-use.

review articles icon Review Articles Articles with the document type Review Article.
early access icon Early Access Records that do not have a final publication date but have been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. This matches the document type Early Access.
Open access icon Open Access Refine results to view only results identified as open access of any kind.

Image of WoS search results that show each of the filter icons on a search result.

Journal Impact Factors

Definition: An impact factor is a number that measures of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. Thomson Reuters

The one year and five year impact factors for journals can be found by clicking on the journal title in the search results list.

image of the journal impact factor pop up for a citation

Additional source for finding impact factors:

Analyze Results

1. You can analyze results for your search by selecting the Analyze Results button at the top of the search results page.

Results list with a red box around a purple button that says analyze results

2. The analysis page will allow you to analyze results by a multitude of categories. Analysis can be viewed as either a visualization, a chart, or both.

Analysis page with several different rectangles of different colors to represent categories.

Citation Report

1. If your results list has fewer than 10,000, then you can view a citation report. When available to select, the Citation Report button will be purple.In the below example, there are 33 results and the Citation Report button is available to select.

Results page with 33 results

2. Citation Reports will allow you to view information relating to the categories of the research results. For instance, you can quickly see the number of citing articles both with and without self-citations, times cited, average times cited per item, and a citation and publications over time graph. For this example, the numbers are rather high as the results were limited to highly cited and hot papers.

Citation report image that shows various statistics as well as a combined line and bar graph.