Citation -Why It is So Important in Scholarly Publishing
- Anyone writing a scholarly paper - from a three-page paper for a freshman writing class, to a 500-page doctoral dissertation - is expected to properly cite his or her sources. That means, providing in clear and understandable fashion, the information that a reader of the paper would need to track down that source material. for example, citing a printed journal article, one should provide the author(s) name(s), the article title, the journal title, volume, issue, date of publication and page numbers.
- But why is this expected?
- Attribution - If you have used information from someone else, you are expected to give the original source credit. Not to do so, even if the original source is in the public domain, is plagiarism, a serious ethical offense in the scholarly world. You would be, in effect, taking credit for someone else's hard work. Moreover, how often a person's work is cited is considered a valuable measure of its importance to its field of research.
- Verification - If you have used information which is not completely presented in your paper, the reader must be able to go back and check the original sources, both to see whether you have reported the information accurately and to check how the original source gathered the information.
- Searchability - While this may not be important for that three-page freshman paper, most scholarly authors want to maximize the likelihood that others working in their field will be able to discover their work. With the existence of databases whch index cited references (see below), a proper citation of a relevant source can mean that other scholars seeking to find papers which build on that previous research will find your paper.
- An interesting point-of-view on the ethics of citations and their uses is Prof. Jan Reedijk's editorial in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, "Citations and Ethics", http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201107554/pdf
- Proper citation requires adherence to a consistent citation style. See Part II of this lecture for details.
Citation Searching
- Like any other piece of information in a document (keywords, authors, journal name, etc.), the cited references in a document can be indexed and made searchable.
- Cited reference searching is particularly useful because it allows the searcher to follow the intellectual trail of an idea or method, from one document to the documents that cite it and vice versa.
- Cited reference indexing was introduced to scholarly publishing by the renowned information scientist, Dr. Eugene Garfield. Inspired by the use of cited precedents in legal decisions, Garfield's company, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), launched Science Citation Index in 1964. With its success, ISI developed similar products for the social sciences, the arts and humaniities, procedigns, etc. and products which analyzed citation patterns for authors and journals (see Part III of this lecture.)
- Electronic versions of Science Citation Index became available on various platforms. Eventually, a Web interface version called Web of Science, combining the science, social science and humanities citation indices in a single product. After ISI's purchase by Thomson Scientific (later part of Thomson Reuters), the interface was applied to more databases. Web of Science and its sister databases are now owned by Clarivate Analytics (https://clarivate.com/).
- Other databases (most notably Chemical Abstracts/SciFinder), Google Scholar and Scopus, offer various types of cited reference linking or searching, but Web of Science remains the premier tool for citation searching.
- The Web of Science core collection is Clarivate Analytics's Web interface to its main citation databases. It is now part of their umbrella interface, the Web of Science . At present, the only Web of Science products to which the UC system subscribes are Web of Science core collection, BIOSIS, Derwent Innovations Index), Data Citation Index, Preprint Citation Index (for all, see Lecture 8, Grants Index, Zoological Record, Current Contents Connect and Journal Citation Reports (JCR, about which, see Part III of this lecture.). We also currently have free access to MEDLINE, the Korean Journal Database, and SciELO Citation Index (SciELO is a collection of free online scholarly jourals,primarily from Latin America.) Clicking the All Databases tab allows you to simultaneously search all subscribed Web of Knowledge databases. Note, however, that All Databases searching uses only the search features with the databases have in common, making it somewhat of a lowest-common-denominator search.
- The core collection includes: Science Citation Index Expanded, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science, Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Humanities and Social Science, Book Citation Index - Science, Book Citation Index - Humanities and Social Science, Current Chemical Reactions and Index Chemicus.
- In addition to the Core Collection, the drop-down Search in menu includes: BIOSIS Citation Index (see Lecture 8), BIOSIS Previews (essentially the same, but without cited reference searching), Current Contents Connect (compiles tables of contents from scholarly journals), Data Citation Index (indexes datasets, and allows you to find articles which cite them), Derwent Innovations Index (see Lecture 8), KCI - Korean Journal Database (like Web of Science, but focused on Korean journals, some of which do not appear in the Core Collection database), MEDLINE (same database as PubMed, but using the WoS interface), Russian Science Citation Index (focuses on Russian journals), SciELO Citation Index (focuses on Latin American journals afailable as open access), Zoological Record (in-depth index to the literature of zoology and animal biology; complements BIOSis Citation Index).
- This service is available by institutional subscription only at this time. The University of California has a current subscription to Web of Science, accessible at http://isiknowledge.com/wos from any ucsb.edu address. The UCSB Library has purchased the Science Citation Index Expanded backfiles back to 1945. with no limit on simultaneous users in the UC system.
- Besides the overview below, you may wished to take a look at Thomson Reuters's recorded training sessions at http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/training/wos/#tab3
- Database overview
- Scope
- Scholarly literature, covering humanities, social sciences and sciences, excepting legal journals.
- Comprehensiveness
- Journals -- around 13,000 journal titles, of those, about 8,300 of which are in the sciences. Note that Web of Science limits its coverage to the "top" journals in each field, as determined by citation statistics. So, more obscure journals in a given field, or new journals that have not yet established a citation track record, may not be included in Web of Science
- Conference proceedings and books
- Chemical reactions from "leading" journals and 36 patent issuing authorities
- Chemical substances, with supporting data, for novel organic substances reported in the journal literature.
- Chronological coverage
- Journals: Sciences: 1900-present (UCSB has 1945-present only). Social Sciences: 1900-present. Arts & Humanities: 1975-present
- Articles indexed about two weeks after publication date.
- Conference proceedings: 1990-present
- Books: 2005-present
- Chemical reactions: Mainly 1985-present, plus about 140,000 records from the French patent literature from 1840-present.
- Chemical substances: 1993-present
- Access points
- First, look at the options under the Documents tab:
- Basic Search (see opening screen below): Topic (searches keywords in the article title, abstract and author's keywords , where available), Title, Author, Publication Titles, Year Published, Affiliation,funding Agency, Publisher, Publication Date, Abstract, Accession Number, Address, Author Identifiers (see below), Author Keywords, Conference, Document Type, DOI, Editor, Funding Agency, Grant Number, Group Author, Keyword Plus, Language, PubMed ID, Web of Science Categories, or combinations of the above.
- You may add additional search lines, or a date range to the search.
- Cited Reference Search: Clicking on the Cited Reference tab allow searching by Cited Author, Cited Work, Cited DOI, Cited Year(s), Cited Volume, Cited Issue, Cited Page(s), Cited Title or any combination of the above (see screenshot below.) For further information on Cited Reference Searching, see the Using Web of Science section below.
- Advanced Search: Clicking the Advanced Search link below the Basic Search window takes you to the screen below. You may enter a complex search query using the two-letter tags to select a search field, and Boolean operators and parentheses to combine them. Example (TS=vitamin* OR TS=common cold) AND AU=pauling l*
- You may also use line numbers from previous searches in the session as search terms. Example (#1 NOT #2) AND CI=Santa Barbara
- Limits: In addition to timespan and databases, Advanced Search allows you to limit by Language and/or Document Type.
- Notice that all of the basic search fields are available, but the cited reference search terms are not. You can, however, do a cited reference search beforehand, and take its search number from the search history and combine it in an advanced search.
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- Structure Search: Drawn structures or substructures, plus (see dropdown menu under the structure drawing screen) Compound Name, Compound Biological Activity, Molecular Weight, Reaction Data: Atmosphere, Pressure, Time, Temperature, Product Yield, Reaction Keyphrases, Reaction Comments.
- The structure search searches information from the Index Chemicus and Current Chemical Reaction databases which has been linked to the Web of Science database.
- Unfortunately, Web of Science includes little detailed help information for the structure drawing tool, so you need to learn how to use it by trial and error. The upper menu bar includes cut, paste and copy tools, undo and redo, and templates for a variety of ring structures, ntiro and carboxylic groups. The left menu bar includes tools for lassoing and rotating structures, erasing, atom-by atom drawing, specifying elements, specifying atom and bod properties, selecting bond type (single, double, etc.), drawing chains, drawing stereo bonds, reaction symbols, atom mapping for reaction searches, and generics (R groups.) The bottom menu bar has commonly used atoms and variable groups.
- You can combine the structure or reaction diagrams with the data fields below the structure drawing window to futher refine your search.
- For an example, see below in the Searching section.
- Clicking on the Researchers tab reveals:
- Name Search: You can enter last names and first names and variants of the names.
- Author Identifiers: Lets you search by ResearcherID or ORCID.
- Organization - You may limit search to most recent publications, past 4 years or all publication.. As you type an organization name, a menu of possible organizations will appear. Note that not all forms of an organization's name will appear. For example, "UCSB" is not in the index, but "University of California - Santa Barbara" is.
- Research Results may be filtered by:
- Highly Cited Researchers
- Includes Web of Science Core Collection Publications
- Includes peer reviews
- Includes editor records
- Claimed Status (Authors may claim their profieles, and offer corrections to them.)
- Author Name
- Organizations
- Subject Categories
- Countries/Regions
Here's an example of a claimed researcher profile:
General Search features
- Truncation -- * represents any number of characters, usually used at the end of a word, ? represents exactly one character, $ represents one or zero characters.
- Lemmatization - This is an automatic feature which searches for singular/plural forms and alternate spellings of terms, e.g. color and colour. It is not applied to terms in quotation marks, and it can be turned off at will using the Search Settings options.
- Boolean operators - AND, OR, NOT available. Parentheses may be used for grouping terms.
- Proximity -- Default search of multiple words assumes the words are a phrase. The FAST search engine automatically combines multiple terms entered without quotation marks with an implied AND. The operator NEAR requires the terms to both be in the title, the author keywords, or the same sentence of the abstract, and is available for Topic and Title searching. The SAME operator is used in the Address field to require that terms be in the same address.
- Stopwords -- The Web of Science platform now searches all entered terms, including "a", "an", "the", prepositions, etc. There are no stopwords.
- Combining searches -- Can do so in advanced search.
Display features
- On the top row, note the Search Box, Analyze Results (see below), Citation Report (see below) and Create Alert. You must be logged inot your personal Web of Science account to create search alers.
- Next tow: Search Box, used for modifying the search. Below it are options to Add Keywords, and a list of suggested Quick Keywords. In this case, carbon dots, graphene quantum dots, etc.
- Next row: The Publications tab displays your current search results. the You may also like... tab suggests additional results related to your search results. On the right, the Copy Query Link option lets you create a link which will recreate the search query later.
- \By default, results are sorted by Relevance. You may use the drop-down menu to alternatively sort by Recently added. Citation Class (see below), Date (oldest or newest first), number of Citations (highest or lowest first), Usage (highest or lowest first), , Conference name (A to Z or Z to A), (A to Z or Z to A) , and Publication title (A to Z or Z to A).
- Citation Class is a new feature that lets you sort results by how they have been most frequently cited: as Background, Basis, Support, Differ or Discuss.
- Above the results list: Add to marked list lets you create a list of selected results which may be printed or exported.
- Export lets you export selected results in a variey of formats, inlcuing EndNOte online, EndNote desktop, plain text (.TXT), .RIS and Excel.
- Each record in the list displays the Title (article title, highlighted, linked to the full document record); Author(s) (in the order given in the orignal paper), Source (journal title, volume, issue, pages and DOI, where available), Published (date of publication of the journal issue, not necessarily the date the article first appeared online) and Times Cited. Usage Count reflects the number of time that users have clicked through to the full text of an article from the Web of Science databases. This value is updated daily.
- Each record has a Get it at UC link. Linking to electronic journals, catalog and interlibrary loan requests is available via UC-eLinks as in most UC-subscribed databases. Some records also have a direct link to the publisher's website. Links may also show connections to open access repositories if available.The three dots icon opens a dropdown menu with options to Add to marked list; Copy accession number; Copy article link; View Related Records (see below) and View Cited References.
- Refine features: Web of Science displays a number of Refine options along the left-hand side of the results display.
- Quick Filers: You may search for terms within the answer set using the left-hand search box.
- You may filter results to Highly Cited in Field (that is, papers in the answer set that are highly cited relative to others in the same discipline); Hot Papers; Review Articles; Early Access; Open Access (that is, appearing in open access journals, or in open access repositories) and Associated Data, that is papers which link to data sets in open access data repositories., Enriched Cited References, Open publisher-invited reviews.
- The other filter options will list the top five items from the answer sets. Clicking on See all... will display a table of all of the possibilities ranked in descending order of occurrence. From the table, you may limit to, or exclude selected items from your results.
- Refinement by
- Publication Year allows you to select one or more years to which to limit the answer set.
- By default, the top 5 ,
- Document Types, such as Article, Review, Conference Paper, etc.
- Researcher Profiles - essentially limits by author
- Web of Science Categories (Note: In WoS, these are assigned to journals, not to individual articles!), ,
- Citation Topics, Meso - Medium specificity categories, such as Caron nanotubes, Semiconductor physics
- Citation Topcs, Micro - Narrower subject categories, such as Quantum dots, GaAs, Aptamers
- Web of Science Index - Indicates which of the files in the Core Collection the artilce appears in.
- Affiliations (that is, organizations at which the authors were employed) are displayed, but you may select
- Affiliation with Department - Narrows the affiliation by department, if specified in the article.
- Publication Titles
- Languages
- Countries/Regions
- Publishers
- Research Areas - broad categories such as Chemistry, Physics, etc.
- Open Access - not just open or closed, but type of open access, such as Gold, Gold Hybrid, Free to Read, etc.
- Filter by Marked List - Lets you narrow the answe set to those you have marked. You can then perform other operation on your marked list.
- Funding Agencies
- Conference Titles
- Group Authors
- Book Series Titles
- Editors
- Editorial Notieces - includes concepts like Retractions, Expressions of Concern
- Sustainable Development Goals - such as "Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure"
Full Document Record
- Each full document record displays the full bibliographic information for the item: article title, author(s), source (journal title, volume, issue, pages and DOI where available), date of publication, date of indexing, document type, conference (if applicable) Also at the top of the record is a Get it at UC button, a Look Up Full Text (in Google Scholar) button,
- Abstract (as provided by the original article)
- Keywords - also author-supplied.
- Author information. Note that the author information includes a link to the author(s) Researcher ID and/or ORCID where available. Those numbers are hotlinked to the respective ResearchID and ORCID webpages. The email address, if available, is also hotlinked.
- Below that, for journal records, is a link to information about the journal: journal subject category, publisher, ISSN and impact factor.
- Categories/ Classification - Thes are the broad, medium and narrow classifications described as Research Areas, Citation Topics Meso, Citation Topics Micro and Sustainable Development Goals in the filers listing above.The latter three are hotlinked.
- Web of Scine Categories - These are the subject ctegories assigned to the journal, not to the individual article.
- Additional information about the journal includes the ISSn, current publisher journal impact factor and subject informaiton.t
- Below that is the list of cited references (not shown on this page.) Each reference links to its full WoS record, where available, and to "Get It at UC" and other full-text links as available. Also given are the number of citations to the reference, and the number of references it contains (if avilable)..
- On the right of the display is the Citation Record, with links to citing records, cited records, related records, with a link for creating a citation alert for this article), as well as a link for submitting corrections if you find an error in a record. Below that are links to most recent citing articles, and to usage count information.
- View Related Records - Pulls up an answer set of all the citations in the database which have cited at least one of the references in the parent record, ranked by how may references they have in common. Theres may have been published before, after or at the same time as the parent record - a unique way to "find more like this".
- You May Also Like - Suggested similr references.
- Most Recently Cited In - lself-explanatory
- Usage in Web of Science - The number of times the full record has been viewed in the past 30 days and pst 10 years. Note that this is not equivalent to counts of how often the article has been downloaded, or viewed on the publisher's website.
- This Record is from - lists which parts of the Core Collection the article was indexed by.
- Suggest a Correction - self-explanatory
Customization Features
- The interface language drop-down menu lets you view the WoS screens in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese or Spanish.
- Users can register to use the personalized features of Web of Science. Click on the Sign In tab (see opening screen above.)
- If you have already registered, enter the e-mail address you used to register and your password.
- If you have not registered, click the Register link under "Customize Your Experience". You will first be prompted to enter an e-mail address; if you are already registered at that e-mal address, you will be reminded of that, and taken to a login screen. If not, you will go to the registration screen below, where you can create a password, to be able to save search histories within Web of Science, create e-mail alert searches, and use EndNote Web and ResearcherID.
Help Features
- Clicking on the Help (upper right hand side of screen) link takes you to context-sensitive help. That is, if you are on the Keyword Search screen when you click Help, you get help on that type of searching; if you are on the Citation List screen, you get help for displaying and selecting citations.
- Once you've entered Help, you can click on the Help Index link to view an alphabetical list of all Help topics, or the Help Table of Contents for a structured list.
- There is no Search function for Help topics.
© 2024 Charles F. Huber
This work by Charles F. Huber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at guides.library.ucsb.edu
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