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.
Web of Science quick reference card
Get started with Web of Science: key features of the database
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
Analyzing search results is useful e.g. when searching for research partners. Results can be saved in Excel for futher processing.
Web of Science ResearchID in Publons from spring 2019
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, |
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) - 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.