Web of Science

by

Clarivate’s publisher-neutral citation index — six decades of curated, cover-to-cover indexing built around the citation as the unit of discovery.

At a Glance

PublisherClarivate (Institute for Scientific Information)
Coverage22,000+ journals indexed cover-to-cover plus conference proceedings and books, 97M+ records, 2.4B+ cited references across 254 subject areas
Accessinstitutional subscription (Core Collection sold as editions — SCIE, SSCI, AHCI, ESCI, plus conference and book indexes)
Free alternativeOpenAlex
Regionalincluded in India’s ONOS; the freely searchable Master Journal List lets anyone check coverage.

Our Take

The oldest name in citation indexing and still the most selective — its in-house editorial team curates rather than auto-ingests, so the signal-to-noise ratio is high and the back catalogue reaches to 1900. That curation is also its blind spot: narrower than Scopus, thinner on non-English and Global South literature, and humanities coverage that leans Anglophone. Where Web of Science genuinely pulls ahead is citation analysis — the Citation Network and Analyze Results tools turn a cited-by number into a map of who, where, and when. Use it as your precision instrument; pair it with OpenAlex or SciELO when you need reach.

Power Tips

  • NEAR/n proximity inside the Topic field, which also works in citation reports (Issue 1)
  • traverse forward and backward citations in the Citation Network panel, then Analyze Results by country, institution, or funder (Issue 2)
  • build a Citation Report to read the per-year curve — a flat-then-spike shape flags a “sleeping beauty” (Issue 2)
  • save any citing set as an alert for ongoing monitoring (Issue 2).

Alternatives & Complements

Scopus · OpenAlex · Dimensions · Google Scholar (for reach).