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Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection

Describes how to access and to search the Web of Science (WOS) database.

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Karen A. Reiman-Sendi
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The University of Michigan
2178 Shapiro Library
919 S. University Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1185
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Introduction

Powered by Clarivate, the Web of Science Core Collection database is a collection of several cross-searchable databases:

  • Science Citation Index Expanded (1900-present)
  • Social Science Citation Index (1900-present)
  • Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975-present)
  • Conference Proceedings Citation Index (1990-present; split into social sciences and humanities, and science)
  • Book Citation Index (2005-present; split into social sciences and humanities, and science)
  • Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present)
  • Current Chemical Reactions (1985-present)

You can search one or more of these databases from the Web of Science interface.

The benefits of searching this citation collection is that one can search for current and retrospective information successfully in over 20,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals (including Open Access journals), covering science, social sciences, and humanities. It also includes 50,000 books, and over 160,000 conference proceedings. The Web of Science collection is particularly good for citation searching, that is, to discover how many times a particular author or article has been cited and by whom, and to locate later works which cite a specific article, allowing one to trace the development of a particular research path. It is important to note that this database covers what the vendor considers to be the "best" journals; the focus is on indexing English language sources. 

If you are looking to mine the large amount of data available from this source, the Library does have the database data in XML format. To request access to these XML files, please send an email to the Digital Scholarship Hub at library-ds@umich.edu.

Profile

With your umich login, you can access this index, but with a Web of Science profile (a separate, additional login), you can:

  • Save search histories and alerts
  • Save your custom search settings
  • Save Marked Lists
  • Save records to EndNote online