Web of Science use in published research and review papers 1997–2017: a selective, dynamic, cross-domain, content-based analysis

Abstract

Clarivate Analytics’s Web of Science (WoS) is the world’s leading scientific citation search and analytical information platform. It is used as both a research tool supporting a broad array of scientific tasks across diverse knowledge domains as well as a dataset for large-scale data-intensive studies. WoS has been used in thousands of published academic studies over the past 20 years. It is also the most enduring commercial legacy of Eugene Garfield. Despite the central position WoS holds in contemporary research, the quantitative impact of WoS has not been previously examined by rigorous scientific studies. To better understand how this key piece of Eugene Garfield’s heritage has contributed to science, we investigated the ways in which WoS (and associated products and features) is mentioned in a sample of 19,478 English-language research and review papers published between 1997 and 2017, as indexed in WoS databases. We offered descriptive analyses of the distribution of the papers across countries, institutions and knowledge domains. We also used natural language processingtechniques to identify the verbs and nouns in the abstracts of these papers that are grammatically connected to WoS-related phrases. This is the first study to empirically investigate the documentation of the use of the WoS platform in published academic papers in both scientometric and linguistic terms.

Bridging Intellectual Capital and SMEs Internationalization through the Lens of Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The search was limited to full-text articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals retrieved via the exploration of three online databases, that is Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics), EBSCO Business Source Complete, and ScienceDirect. The choice of Clarivate Analytics's Web of Science (WoS) as a preliminary search engine for identifying relevant sources was founded on Li et al's [58] specialized study published in Scientometrics in 2018, according to which WoS "is the world's leading scientific citation search and analytical information platform. It is used as both a research tool supporting a broad array of scientific tasks across diverse knowledge domains as well as a dataset for large-scale data-intensive studies" (p. 1).…”

A tale of two databases: the use of Web of Science and Scopus in academic papers

“…We also calculate the relative share of each category among all the WoS/Scopus-related records and the ratio of studies that use WoS/Scopus in a specific category relative to the total number of studies in that category. Echoing the finding ofLi et al (2018) and , its rankings and relative shares (columns: % Within WoS/Scopus studies) decrease for both two groups 9 .However, compared to other top categories, the use of WoS/Scopus in this category are always more frequently for all the three phases (columns: % Within entire category). Besides, both WoS and Scopus are more and more frequently mentioned in Information Science & Library Science records evidenced by the rising shares provided by columns of % Within entire category inTable 2.Medicine, General & Internal is the largest category for both groups.…”

Visualizing Sustainability Research in Business and Management (1990–2019) and Emerging Topics: A Large-Scale Bibliometric Analysis

“…We reviewed sustainability research from 1990 to 2019 from the ISI Web of Science Core Collection database, as adopted by prior research [2,5,35]. Another widely use dataset, Scopus, covers a wider journal range but it is currently limited to recent articles (mainly after 1995) compared with Web of Science [36].…”