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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.

Citation Report

To see the metrics of a particular document, search for the article title and then click on Citation Report at the top of the results. If you are wanting a citation report for all Web of Science databases, rather than just the core collection, then make sure you have chosen 'search in: all databases' before you search for the title of the article. 

Alternatively, you can create a report for multiple documents (up to 10,000 records) by doing a broader search and then clicking the box to the left of each of the records that you would like to be included before clicking on Citation Report.

Screenshot from Web of Science. All databases have been searched for an article. There is an arrow pointing to the option for 'citation report.' This is middle button of three at the top right of the results. (the first button says 'analyse results' and the 3rd button says 'create alert.'

The Citation Reports page includes citation metrics at the top of the page:

  • Publications. Confirms the number of publications included in this citation report
  • Citing Articles. Shows the total number of citing articles; click the number to open a list of these articles. Click Analyse to go through to Analyse Results page. The number of citing articles retrieved may be smaller than the sum of the Times Cited count, because an article may cite more than one item in the set of search results. For example, if you have six articles in the citation report, an author may have cited three of the articles in their paper. In this case, Web of Science retrieves four citing articles and not six, because it only displays a citing article once. The Without Self Citations section displays the total number of citing articles minus any article that appears in the set of search results. 
  • Times Cited. Displays the total number of citations (cited references) to all items found in the results set. Average per item is the sum of the Times Cited count divided by the number of results in the results found. Without self citations displays the total number of citations (cited references) to all of the items found in the results set, but excludes any citation from articles in the set.
  • H-Index. This is based on a list of publications ranked in descending order by the Times Cited count. An index of h means there are h papers that each have been cited h times. The h-index is based on the depth of years of Imperial's subscription.