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Citation Databases

What they are and how to use them

Web of Science

Web of Science has a number of special use cases for researchers, students, and administrators. Like Scopus it maintains a wide, and varying range of research output, but unlike Scopus it has very specific topic search capabilities. These will be covered in more detail below. This gives researchers special tools to take advantage of.

Searching in Web of Science

  1. Topic search
  2. Title search
  3. Author Search
  4. Publication Search

Web of Science search bar

 

1.Topic search is the default search option in Web of Science you can use an to search for a topic. So for example if you wanted to search for "romans in briton" you would type "Romans* briton" into the search bar, the asterisk tells the database what you're looking for.

results menu

 

2. Title search: use this search function to search for articles based on title, you can use this for finding articles you either know the title of, or that you know keywords for.

3. Author search: use this function to search articles by a specific author that you know the name of

4. Publication search: use this search function to search for journals either that you know of, or that contain keywords in their name