The Web of Science is a platform providing access to multiple databases of academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. If a journal is indexed in the WoS, it is a "quality mark" for the publication. In other words, it is a platform where authors, their potential reviewers, and publishers find each other. It is owned by Clarivate.
Registration in the WoS remains free and is accessible at link. However, the user can see the following even without registration:
- Researcher’s profile including institution affiliation.
- Researcher’s identifier in the WoS
- 10 most recent publications including those indexed in the Core Collection.
- Reviews, grants, editorial board membership
- Publication metrics (h-index, number of citations, citation ratio, number of reviews).
- Publication and review tables
You can search by name, the author’s personal identifier (Web of Science ResearchID or ORCID), or by the institution
For example, if you search data for ITMO, you receive the list of all authors affiliated to the university. Please note that the right column provides data on the years of active publication.
The author’s profile has the following structure:
All basic data about the author including the titles of their recent articles are available. However, it is not possible to receive:
- Access to the Web of Science Researcher or search by the title
- Access to a list of cited papers
- Access to citation report.
- Beamplot, geographical citation map, list of co-authors and analysis of the author's position and some other indicators
Viewing a particular publication you can receive the information about the publisher, to read the abstract, the keywords, and see the citation web.
If the paper is indexed in the WoS, its data can be viewed in the advanced tab:
Thus, a young scholar can find a potential journal for publication by analyzing the scope of those where their more experienced colleagues publish.
It is also possible to search for scholarly literature in the WoS, using the tools available. Each publication refers to a specific “citation topic”, which is indicated at the very bottom of the page with the information about the paper. By clicking on it, you can see some other publications related to the topic.
Unfortunately, the text filtering option is blocked. There is no way to sort the list of papers. On the other hand, WoS offers the links to the full texts from the publisher’s site. If a paper is published in an open-access journal, you will be able to read it or even download it.
We hope you find this information helpful in your work!