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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.

Cited reference searching

Web of Science offers the capability to search the list of cited references in articles, books, and other resources. If the reference you are utilising is really relevant to your research, it is likely that other related publications have cited references that are also pertinent. Cited reference searching serves as a valuable addition to traditional keyword searches.

Once you have searched your results, you can sort them by Citations: Highest First.  Remember, just because an article has been cited a high number of times that doesn't mean that it is the best article on the topic- it may just be that it's older and so has had more time to be cited or people were citing it as criticism.

You can then click on the number in the right hand column in order to see who has referenced that article. You can then refine and sort those articles as you could your original results. 

Screenshot showing a search for ethical businesses in Web of Science. There are arrows pointing towards the option of putting the search in order of highest citations and an arrow pointing towards the number of citations towards the right of the record.

Citation Class Searching

Since Summer 2021, Web of Science has been classifying each in-text mention to indicate why the author may have cited the reference. This aims to give a more nuanced approach to finding similar results because you can see which citations were positive. As well as sorting your results by highest citations you can also sort them by citation class. 

Screenshot showing Web of Science with the options for reordering the search by citation class. They are: background, basis, support, differ discuss. All highest first.