Evaluation based on scientific publishing: Web of Science

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Web of Science (WoS)

Web of Science master journal list contains also information about the openness of the journals. At the same page there is access to "manuscript matcher" -service which is a tool for searching best match for manuscript. Registration is needed for manuscript matcher.

WoS as a source of citation information

WoS, along with Scopus-database, is an important database containing citation information.  WoS contains citation information since beginning of the 1900´s.

Journal Impact Factor -indicator is counted based on WoS citations. Impact Factors can be search in Journal Citation Reports -database.

Citation report and the H-index. Video tutorial. (video 6,09 min)

Cited reference search is recommended if there is a need to find all citations  comprehensively including the oldest ones and not depending on the order of authors.

Visualizing citations: Citation Map

Citation alert

Analyzing references in WoS

Analyzing search results is useful e.g. when searching for research partners. Results can be saved in Excel for futher  processing.

Read more

More products of Thomson Reuters

Web of Science and ResearcherID

Web of Science ResearchID in Publons from spring 2019

Comparison of Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar

The most important multidisciplinary databases containing citation information are Web of Sciece (WoS) by Thomson Reuters and Scopus by Elsevier.  Citations can also be retrieved from Google Scholar (GS) keeping in mind the limitations of the database. GS contains a lot of non-scientific citations. The number of citations can vary a lot between Web of Science, Scopus and especially GS.

In addition, there are some field specific databases which contain reference information such as Chemical Abstracts (SciFinder), CiteSeerX and MathScinet.

Table below: Comparison of WoS, Scopus and GS

Feature

Web of Science (more information)

Scopus (more information)

Google Scholar (more information)

Availability

subscription based

subscription based

freely accessible

Number of journals

 22 000 peer-reviewed journals

23 500 peer-reviewed journals

information is not publically available

Other contents

conference proceedings, books

conference proceedings, professional magazines, patents and book series

books, pre-prints, theses and dissertations, and webpages

Main disiplines

Natural Sciences, Technology, Social Sciences, Fine Arts and Humanities

Physics, Technology, Health Sciences, Bio sciences, Fine Arts and Humanities,
Social Sciences

information is not publically availabale

Time span

from 1900 (Science), 1956 (Social Sciences) and 1975 (Arts and Humanities), accessble

records back to 1788

 

information is not publically availabale

Up-dates

weekly

daily

information not publically available, but more or less monthly

Collection policy

public

public

information not publically available, contracts with most significant publishing houses

Citation analysis

Citation Report -tool

View citation overview -tool

search report with a 'Cited by' link, giving  all pulications which cite the publication in question

Time span of citation information

from 1900  (Science), from 1956 (Social Sciences) and from 1975 (Arts and Humanities); citation statistics available at Oulu University Library for the whole period, but the referencing articles only available from 1975

cited references dating back to 1970

information is not publically availabale

Web of Science Scopus Google Scholar
Indicators Journal Citation Reports:
- Article Influence (AI)
- Eigenfactor
- H-index
- Immediacy Index
- Impact Factor (IF)
- H-index
- Raw impact per publication (RIP)
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
Source normalized impact per paper (SNIP)
Field-Weighted Citation Impact 
- H-index
Tools - Journal Citation Reports
- Eigenfactor
- ScienceWatch 
- Scival
- SCImago Journal and Country Rank
- CWTS Journal Indicators
- Publish or Perish 
University rankings

- Shanghai Ranking eli Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)
- National Taiwan University Ranking (NTU)
- University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP)
- U.S. News & World Report's Best Global Universities Rankings
- CWTS Leiden Ranking
- U-Multirank

- Review of the state of scientific research in Finland by The Academy of Finland

- Times Higher Education World University Rankings
- QS World University Rankings
- Webometrics
- Webometrics
Researcher profile ResearcherID Scopus Author Identifier
- also Scopus Affiliation Identifier
Google Scholar Profile


From the perspective of citation analysis, what matters most, is the number of records enhanced by cited references and the total number of cited references included in the database used. In addition to contributing citation data, citation enhanced databases may serve as a platform providing the analytical tools for bibliometric analysis. Both of these contributions are beset with several methodological and technical difficulties, including limited coverage of the scholarly literature, inconsistent and inaccurate data, and limited facilities for browsing, searching and analyzing data. Most of these difficulties arise because bibliographic databases are primarily designed for information retrieval and bibliometric analysis represents only a secondary use of the systems.

Both Web of Science and Scopus have master records with cited references, and they show the bibliographic and reference details of the citing records. Web of Science is available in many different versions regarding years of coverage and citation indexes included in the subscription of the user's institution. Web of Science always includes all the cited references for every record created, irrespective of the publication year and subscription. Scopus includes cited reference information for records of papers published from 1970 onward.

Google Scholar's coverage is unknown and might be uneven across different fields of science. Additonally, older publications are poorly covered. To continue non-scholarly literature and citations are included.