ISI Web of Science: Getting Started   Tags: science, science_general, web_of_knowledge, web_of_science  

This guide will help you get started. For more extensive and detailed help, please see the ISI help pages.

You can also Ask A Librarian.

For help with impact factors, start with our Citation Analysis Guide, and contact your subject specialist librarian.

In the rare event of an outage, you could find more information on our Library Outages page.

Watch a video, created specifically for UM students, which explains the basics of how to access and use ISI Web of Science.

Here's the older version of this video.

Powered by ISI Web of Knowledge, the Web of Science database is a collection of cross-searchable databases:

• Science Citation Index (SCI)
• Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)
• Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science
• Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Science & Humanities

You can search one or more of these databases; select by checking the boxes. 

You can search for current and retrospective information, by topic, author, etc. The Web of Science is particularly good for citation searching, 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.

Access Web of Science here or find it via Search Tools: Find Databases. Remote access to Web of Science is available to any current University of Michigan student, staff or faculty.

You may:

a) Select a search option -

b) Type your search term(s) in the boxes. You may specify fields using the drop-down menus.

c) Select one or more databases and timespan. Note that SCI, SSCI and AHCI begin in different years, so there is no overlap for certain decades. If you decide to change the timespan or switch databases, you may do so during the search process.