Web of Science: Web of Science: Summary of Coverage

Web of Science Core Collection

Web of Science platform

Summary

A rich collection of citation indexes representing the citation connections between scholarly research articles found in the most globally significant journals, books, and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences and art & humanities.

The Web of Science Core Collection serves as the standard data set underpinning the journal impact metrics found in the Journal Citation Reports and the institutional performance metrics found in InCites.

A platform providing access to multidisciplinary and regional citation indexes; specialist subject indexes; a patent family index; and an index to scientific data sets.

The Web of Science provides a common search language, navigation environment, and data structure allowing researchers to search broadly across disparate resources and use the citation connections inherent to the index to navigate to relevant research results and measure impact.  

Number of journals

> 18,200 journals + books and conference proceedings

> 32,800 journals + books, proceedings, patents, and data sets

Journal acceptance rate

10-12%

Each journal is rigorously evaluated prior to selection. Once selected, all content is indexed cover to cover.

Varies by database

Coverage

• Over 68 million records
• More than 88,000 books
• Over 10.1 million conference papers

• 145 million records (journals, books, and proceedings)
• 33.5 million patent families (> 70 million patents)
• 7.2 million data sets

Content

Life sciences, biomedical sciences, engineering, social sciences, arts & humanities.

Strongest coverage of natural sciences, health sciences, engineering, computer science, materials sciences.

Access to regional citation indexes for Korea, Latin America, and Russia is typically provided at the platform level with a standard Web of Science Core Collection subscription.

Biomedical sciences, natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, arts & humanities.

Strongest coverage of natural sciences & engineering, computer science, materials sciences, patents, data sets.

Regional Citation indexes provide deep coverage in sciences, social sciences, and humanities for Korea, Russia, Latin America, and China.

Databases covered

Citation Indexes:

• Science Citation Index
• Social Sciences Citation Index
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
• Conference Proceedings Citation Index
• Book Citation Index
• Emerging Sources Citation Index

Citation Indexes:

• Web of Science Core Collection
• BIOSIS Citation Index
• Chinese Science Citation Database
• Data Citation Index
• Russian Science Citation Index
• SciELO Citation Index

Subject specialized and regional indexes:

• Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews
• CABI: CAB Abstracts and Global Health
• FSTA—the food science resource
• Inspec
• KCI—Korean Journal Database
• Medline
• Zoological Record

Other resources:

• Current Contents Connect
• Derwent Innovations Index (Patents)

Time period covered

Sciences: 1900-present

Social Sciences: 1900-present

Arts & Humanities: 1975-present

Proceedings: 1990-present

Books: 2005-present

Emerging Source Citation Index: 2005-present

Full cited reference indexing for all content

Journal literature: 1800-present

Patents: 1963-present

Full cited reference indexing for all Web of Science Core Collection content

Citation indexing for ScIELO, Russian Science Citation Index, Chinese Science Citation Index, and BIOSIS Citation Index

All content includes Times Cited information for citations from Web of Science Core Collection and the Web of Science platform Citation Sources

Cited references

• > 1 billion (1900 to present)
• 64 million items with cited references
• Each cited reference is indexed and searchable
• A. Einstein (>24k citations)

• > 1 billion (1900 to present)
• > 100 million items with cited references
• A. Einstein (>38k citations)

Author indexing

All authors from all publications are indexed.

Authors linked to address from 2008-forward.

WoS Core Collection: All authors form all publications are indexed.

Other resources: Author indexing varies by resource.

Institution indexing

All author affiliations are indexed.

Institution’s variants and parent/child relationships are mapped and connected to a preferred institutional name through a manually-curated process.

Author affiliation indexing varies by collection.

Updating frequency

Daily (Monday through Friday)

Each collection is updated on its own schedule ranging from daily to monthly.

Publisher

Clarivate Analytics

Clarivate Analytics: Web of Science Core Collection, Zoological Records, BIOSIS, Data Citation Index, Derwent Citation Index

IEE: Inspec

FSTA: FSTA

CABI: CAB Abstracts

NLM: Medline

Chinese Academy of Science: CSCD

SciELO: SciELO

Korean Academy of Sciences: KJD

Russian Academy of Sciences: RSCI

Citation analysis

Yes, including citation tracking, citation counts, and author h-index calculations

“Hot” and “Highly Cited” articles (top performing by citation comparison) are available from Essential Science Indicators integration

Journal Impact Factors and Journal Performance Quartiles are available via Journal Citation Reports Integration (JCR Quartiles available without subscription to JCR)

Yes, including citation tracking, citation counts, and author h-index calculations

“Hot” and “Highly Cited” articles (top performing by citation comparison) are available from Essential Science Indicators integration

Controlled vocabulary

No.

Keyword fields include Author Keywords, and “Keywords+” which are extracted from the titles of Cited Articles

Controlled indexing is provided for institution affiliations (parent child mapping)

Controlled vocabulary searching is provided for Medline, Inspec, FSTA, BIOSIS, Zoological Record.

Export feature for references

Yes

Yes

Alerts feature

Yes

Yes

(While search and citation alerting is available for each dataset, search alerting is not available for “ALL Database Search”)

Relative strengths

• More thorough coverage of older literature, and deeper citation indexing across all content
• Detailed Cited Reference Searching is available
• Dataset is the standard data set for ‘bibliometric’ analysis for identifying and monitoring research trends
• Ability to analyze search results by author, affiliation, country, journal/book title, and broad subject categories.
• Can sort search results according to how frequently the articles have been cited, or how frequently that have been used (exported or served as links to full text) on the platform.
• Indexes every paper in the journals, books and proceedings covered (cover to cover indexing for all sources.)
• Consistently applies subject categorization across all items selected for coverage
• Since 2007, links between authors and their stated affiliations
• All authors from all publications are indexed, searchable, and unified based on ORCID and ResearcherID profiles
• All institutional affiliation are indexed and searchable
• Funding Data: Includes funding acknowledgment data form 2008 to present, and is integrated with Medline for further funding data from National Library of Medicine
• Keywords Plus – our algorithm analyzes the titles of cited references to identify words and phrases that occur with significant frequency
• Related Records—find records that share references in common, defining ‘relatedness’ not by shared terminology, but by shared citation patterns
• Integrations with ResearcherID and ORCID for author identifier searching

• Deep coverage of journal literature from traditional and emerging research economies
• Citation network links included for all citation sources
• Times cited counts reflect citations from all citation resources
• Non-citation sources include ‘times cited counts reflection citation from all citation sources
• Deep indexing of patent literature from over 50 patent issuing authorities
• Expanding indexing of data sets and data studies
• Consistently applies subject categorization across all items indexed.
• Precise searching across all content in a single search.