Web of Science

The Web of Science (WoS; previously known as Web of Knowledge) is a paid-access platform that provides (typically via the internet) access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. It was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate.

The Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database is a selective citation index of scientific and scholarly publishing covering journals, proceedings, books, and data compilations. It is the oldest citation index for the sciences, having been introduced commercially by the ISI in 1964, initially as an information retrieval tool called the Science Citation Index (SCI) (Garfield, 1964). The first SCI covered some 700 journals, expanded to 1,573 within two years, and was produced in printed form as a series of volumes presenting bibliographic and citation data in a very small font size. With the rapid growth of the research enterprise in the 1960s, annual volumes of the SCI increased in size and journal coverage. By 1970, around 2,200 journals were indexed, along with four million cited references from these sources.

The coverage of WoS has thus expanded vastly since the inception of the underpinning systems, growing to about 34,000 journals today. This is not directly comparable to the original data set because there have been many mergers, content changes, and deletions as well as extensive additions in most fields. The WoS platform now extends the content of the Core Collection through hosting citation databases of other providers, such as the BIOSIS Citation Index, the Chinese Science Citation Database, the Russian Science Citation Index, and the SciELO Citation Index (for Latin America and Iberia), as well as specialized databases, including Medline, Inspec, KCI—Korean Journal Database—and the Derwent Innovations Index, covering the patent literature.