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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.

Basic Searching

This page describes what happens when you have turned Smart Search off on the homepage. Firstly, we will do a very quick search so that you get an idea of how to search and navigate Web of Science. You can find out more about Smart Search on our Smart Search page. 

Type sustainability in the search box. Click Search or press Enter to see the results. 

screenshot of the search box with the word 'sustainability' in it

Displaying Results

The results of your search will now be displayed on a new page. 

Results are listed in groups of 50 but this can be adjusted at the bottom of the page.

  • Click on the title in order to see more details about the article including full reference, abstract and indexed keywords.

  • Click on the names of any of the authors to see recent documents they’ve published and the opportunity to view their profile.

  • Click on Show More at the end of the abstract sample to see the full abstract. 

Web of Science automatically shows the title and start of the abstract for each result.

The best way to view the full article, especially when off campus, is to click on the Find@Imperial link. This will take you through to the Imperial College library catalogue. If we do not subscribe to the appropriate journal there will be a link to order the article as a Document Delivery.

To the right of the record you can click on the numbers to see the articles that have cited this one and also its references.  If the article has been cited a number of times then that’s a really good way of finding other similar results.

Click on Related Records to see articles that are judged to have something in common with this article because they cite at least one document cited by it. These related records are listed in order of the references that they share with this article and do not consider other aspects such as words shared in the title or abstract. 

screenshot showing results for searching sustainability (608,323 results.) There are also arrows pointing at the 'find at Imperial' link which is a blue button at the bottom left of the abstract and 'related records' which is bottom right of the record.