Web of Science

Web of Science provides access to leading scholarly literature in the sciences, social sciences in addition to proceedings of international conferences, symposia and seminars that may be helpful in your pursuits. While you don’t need to create an account to search Web of Science, it can be a helpful way to retain searches, get recommendations based on those searches and create lists of documents that you can batch export, which is how I created the bibliometrics visualizations that I brought up earlier.

I won’t go into many of the search features that are now familiar to you but just focus on where the platform stands out in it’s ability to not only search by keyword and subject, but really focus in on scholarly work produced by researchers, specific organizations, who they cited and who cited them. This is helpful for understanding the development of particular areas of scientific thought.

Screen capture of how to look up researchers and see who they cited, who cited them and a visualization of that data

In the example above looking at Taylor Wilderness Research Center natural science academic James Akenson, by locating their academic profile, we can see who they cited in their work, who cited them and the visualization of that data to form specific connections around their scholarship and their academic networks.