Skip to Main Content

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.

Sort and refine your results

You can sort your results using the menu at the top right. By default, Web of Science organises results so the most relevant articles are first. Your options for searching are:

  • Relevance. Sorts records in descending order based on a ranking system that considers how many of the search terms are found in each record. The Title and Keywords fields are weighted slightly more than the Abstract and Keywords Plus fields.
  • Recently added. Sorts records based on the date when the records were entered into Web of Science (newest to oldest) rather than when the journal was published.
  • Citation Class. 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. You can find out more about Citation Class here.
  • Date. Sorts records in order of the date on the cover of the journal. 
  • Citations. Sorts records in order of the Times Cited number. 
  • Usage. Can order depending on usage of all time (since 2013) or the last 180 days. 
  • First Author Name. Alphabetical by author surname.
  • Publication Title. Alphabetical by source (e.g., journal) title.
  • Document Title. Alphabetical by name of the article. 

Refine your results

You can limit your results using the left hand column. As well as the Quick Filters, especially useful are the Publication Years, Document Type and Languages options. You can also Search within results to add extra terms to your search strategy. 

The countries/regions option will limit to the country where the author's institution is based, rather than where the research was carried out. 

The Quick Filters are:

  • Highly Cited Papers. Web of Science have a formula to work out article citations over the time since the paper was published. Find out more on their page here. 
  • Hot Paper In Field. Articles published in the last two years that are placed in the top 0.1% of papers. Find out more on their page here. 
  • Associated Data. Articles that mention a data set or data repository that can be accessed for potential reuse. 
  • Review Article. Where document type has been set as Review Article. 
  • Early Access. Articles that do not have a publication date yet but have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. 
  • Open Access. Articles that have been identified as Open Access of any type.