Impact Metrics and Scholarly Attribution

Web of Science is a multidisciplinary database that can be used to gather and organize author information for the purpose of evaluating Author Impact.

Researcher Search in Web of Science is a guide to finding articles written by a specific author.

Web of Science Citation Reports shows how that Web of Science feature can be used to get information about how an author is being cited, including the author's H-Index.

Results Analysis shows how that feature can be used to sort an author's output by various categories.

Like all databases, the Web of Science does not include all articles published, but its selection of journals is highly respected and thus useful for citation analysis.

Cited Reference Search in Web of Science (under Article Impact) can also include references to non-Web of Science indexed works (thus increasing the citation counts for an author), however a Citation Report from a Cited Reference Search analyzes the citing works, not the author's works.

It is crucial to remember that all the tools of citation metrics have limitations. For best results use multiple tools.

Also remember that this is a quantitative tool, and that citations do not necessarily indicate a positive review of an article.

Accessing the Web of Science

Here is a link to the Web of Science database. Off-campus users (UCLA students, faculty and staff) will need to use the proxy server or VPN. 

The default screen is the Search page.

Using Researcher Search in the Web of Science

You can search using the author field on the Web of Science search page, but for a more controlled search try using Researcher Search. While the search defaults to "Documents", you can click on "Researchers" instead and search for authors that way.

Enter Author Name. Use the full name and first initial. Since names in citations vary in degrees of completeness, for a more comprehensive search only enter the first initial and do not specify exact matches.  If a name can be spelled more than one way, you may wish to click on Add Author Name Variant to include those alternative spellings.

Once you click "Search", a list of results will populate. To narrow multiple results, you can also use the limiters on the left hand side of the page to narrow further. "Affiliation" can be particularly useful in narrowing your search. Affiliation can include companies, institutes, groups and academic institutions with which the author has been and is currently associated.

Use these limiters with caution, however. They can be helpful in narrowing results, if the information is accurate, but there is also the danger of missed references.

Click on Finish Search.

Results List

The results can be further refined by using the options in the Refine Results pane. The goal is define the author as accurately as possible in order to focus on the correct author, but broad enough to include variant names of the same author.

After you narrow the list of results to a specific author's articles, you can:

• Merge or correct records
• Click into a researcher's profile and
  • Click on an article to see its full record; where you can view the lists of article that cited it (Times Cited) and articles it cites (Cited References); and link to its full-text (if available) 
  • Tag an article for a Citation Alert, where you'll be notified whenever that article is cited by an article indexed in the Web of Science.
  • Create a Citation Report.
  • Create an author alert

This feature provides statistical information about an author's publishing output (indexed within Web of Science) and the citations the author's work has received. It can be used to discern patterns, find an H-Index, and get a fuller picture of the publishing and citation history of an individual author.

Once you've done a Researcher Search and have appropriately refined your results, click on View Citation Report on the left hand side of the researcher's page.

This report includes a summary, a graph, and a list of publications that can be ranked in several ways, including by most cited. 

The summary includes total number of publications, citation information, and H-index (based on the citation results returned by Web of Science).

Beneath the summary is a graph measuring Times Cited and Publications Over Time. If you hover over one year, you can see the number of works the researcher published that year and how many total citations they received. 

Below this information, the list of papers can be sorted in various ways.

The number of citations for each article by year are also cited within the report.

The "Analyze Results" feature allows you to compare and discern patterns in a researcher's output.

Within the Citation Report, across from the researcher's name, there will be an "Analyze Results" button.

This will bring up a TreeMap chart; the default analysis will display Web of Science categories. This helps visualize the breakdown in the researcher's fields and interests.

You can manipulate this graph, changing it to a bar chart or limiting the number of results.

You may also be interested in other kinds of analysis. You can also analyze the following fields:

• Publication Years
• Final Publication Year
• Document Types
• Researcher Profiles
• Authors
• Web of Science Categories
• Citation Topics Meso
• Citation Topics Micro
• Web of Science Index
• Affiliations

You'll notice that when you change your analysis, a new chart will populate beneath the visualization. This list will break down the visualization by Record Count and Percent. So, if you are viewing Web of Science categories, you'll be able to view exactly how many records fall in to each category and what percent of the total records each category makes up.