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Web of Science

Web of science is a collection of multidisciplinary databases and so useful for most researchers. this guide will show you how to use it to find the information you are looking for.

Accessing Web of Science

Introduction to Web of Science

Web of Science is a platform that gives you access to a number of different databases. The default is for Smart Search in All Databases. On the home page, you have the option to search Core Collection above the search box. You can toggle off Smart Search towards the top right of the screen. You can find out more about Smart Search on our Smart Search page. 

The Web of Science homepage. The option to toggle off SmartSearch is at the top right. Above the search box it tells you that you're now searching all databases but gives you a link if you want to change this to Core Collection.

Click on Advanced Search, or turn off Smart Search,  to get more details about what you can search. By clicking on Collections you can see what indexes are included in the Core Collection. Alternatively, you can click on Search In to choose an individual database to search or to search all databases at once. 

Web of Science brings back results from over 22,000 journals, over 308,000 conferences and over 151,000 books in 254 categories. It is therefore a useful platform for all the subjects taught at Imperial. 

A shot of the page that is seen when advanced search is chosen from the homepage. There are two tabs- documents and researchers. For documents, there are then drop down menus so you can choose the databases within Web of Science that you'd like to search and which collections.

 

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