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Web of Science as a data source for research on scientific and scholarly activity

Article  in  Quantitative Science Studies · January 2020

DOI: 10.1162/qss_a_00018

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 ARTICLE

Web of Science as a data source for research

on scientific and scholarly activity

Caroline Birkle, David A. Pendlebury , Joshua Schnell , and Jonathan Adams

Institute for Scientific Information, Web of Science Group, 160 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8EZ, UK

an open access journal

Keywords: authoritative content, bibliometrics, Eugene Garfield, ISI, premier source, selective
bibliography, Web of Science

ABSTRACT
Web of Science (WoS) is the world’s oldest, most widely used and authoritative database of research
Citation: Birkle, C., Pendlebury, D. A.,
Schnell, J., & Adams, J. (2020). Web of
publications and citations. Based on the Science Citation Index, founded by Eugene Garfield in 1964,
Science as a data source for research it has expanded its selective, balanced, and complete coverage of the world’s leading research to
on scientific and scholarly activity.
Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), cover around 34,000 journals today. A wide range of use cases are supported by WoS from daily
363–376. https://doi.org/10.1162/
qss_a_00018 search and discovery by researchers worldwide through to the supply of analytical data sets and the
provision of specialized access to raw data for bibliometric partners. A long- and well-established
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00018 network of such partners enables the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to continue to work
closely with bibliometric groups around the world to the benefit of both the community and the
Received: 21 June 2019
Accepted: 26 October 2019 services that the company provides to researchers and analysts.

Corresponding Author:
Jonathan Adams
[email protected]
1. WEB OF SCIENCE
Handling Editors:
Ludo Waltman and Vincent Larivière
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.
During these years, a range of innovations and products was introduced by ISI, which
citation-indexing pioneer Eugene Garfield (1925–2017) had founded in 1960 (Cawkell &
Garfield, 2001; Lawlor, 2014; Lazerow, 1974). The company also produced the Social
Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) (1973), the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) (1978),
and other indexes covering the chemical (Current Chemical Reactions, Index Chemicus) and
proceedings (Conference Proceedings Citation Index) literatures. A citation index for books
was launched in 2011 (Adams & Testa, 2012). As technology advanced from the 1960s through
the 1990s, other formats and media for distributing and analyzing SCI data—from magnetic
tapes, to floppy disks, to CD-ROMs, to standard file formats distributed via the World Wide
Copyright: © 2020 Caroline Birkle,
David A. Pendlebury, Joshua Schnell, Web—profoundly changed information access and accelerated bibliometric research based
and Jonathan Adams. Published under on publication and citation data.
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Selectivity in coverage has long characterized the SCI, SSCI, and A&HCI, which were com-
bined and launched on the World Wide Web as WoS in 1997. With the earliest versions of the

The MIT Press

Web of Science

SCI, journal selection was constrained by cost considerations, including computation and
printing. Computing power increased and digital dissemination reduced expenses, but se-
lectivity remained a hallmark of coverage because Garfield had decided early on to focus on
internationally influential journals. His decision was informed by Bradford’s Law of Scattering
(Bradford, 1934) as well as his own research on SCI data that revealed Garfield’s Law of
Concentration (Garfield, 1971, 1972). Garfield’s Law of Concentration generalized Bradford’s
insights concerning specific fields to all fields of science and demonstrated the existence of a
multidisciplinary core set of journals, then as few as 1,000. More recently, the globalization of
research has highlighted the relevance of local and regional journals for science that addresses
societal needs. The WoS group has deepened its journal coverage, principally through the in-
troduction of the Emerging Sources Citation Index (2015) (Huang et al., 2017; Somoza-
Fernandez et al., 2018), to give a more complete coverage of the most influential research while
maintaining the balance across subjects and regions that underpins informed search and good
analytics.
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 orig-
inal 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, includ-
ing Medline, Inspec, KCI—Korean Journal Database—and the Derwent Innovations Index,
covering the patent literature. The scope and bibliometric characteristics of the WoS Core
Collection and WoS platform are summarized in Table 1.
Visser, van Eck, and Waltman have recently compared different sources of bibliographic
and citation data, including WoS (Visser et al., 2019) and—for those who wish to consult
it—their analysis provides further information to guide good practice and research use.

2. WOS DATA ENABLED THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTOMETRICS

WoS is not just a catalogue of academic publications. It is a selective, structured, and balanced
database with complete citation linkages and enhanced metadata that supports a wide range
of information purposes. An early example of the use of SCI data for research is Derek J.
de Solla Price’s study “Networks of Scientific Papers” (Price, 1965). Price showed how a net-
work of cited references in papers (citations) could be used to describe the structure and dynamics
of a research topic, since then often called a research front. Sociologists Stephen and Jonathan
Cole’s work “Scientific Output and Recognition” (Cole & Cole, 1967) is one of the first times that
citations were used systematically as a measure of scientific quality or impact (Cole, 2000). This
study of physicists sought to show variations in recognition in terms of institutional affiliation, pro-
ductivity, quality (citations as the indicator), honors, age, and other variables. Citations were found
to be highly correlated with peer judgment of “quality.” Early research on scientific activity using
SCI data typically required many hours of manual labor involving repeated access to different
cross-referenced, heavy volumes. Indeed, as one of us can attest (D.A.P.), an early form of
research evaluation of individuals made use of a ruler to measure column inches of citations!
WoS was not designed for scientometric analysis. Garfield created the SCI and its sister
citation indexes for information retrieval. Use of the data for other purposes, such as research
performance evaluation, including rankings, mapping topics and monitoring trends, and inves-
tigating aspects of the history and sociology of science and scholarly activity, was of secondary

Quantitative Science Studies 364

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Web of Science
Table 1. Key Characteristics of data sources built on web of science

Web of Science Web of Science

Core Collection Platform
Summary Citation indexes representing the connections A platform providing access to multidisciplinary
between scholarly research articles found in and regional citation indexes, specialist subject
globally significant journals, books, and indexes, a patent family index, and an index to
proceedings in the sciences, social sciences scientific data sets.
and art & humanities. WoS provides a common search language,
navigation environment, and data structure,
The WoS Core Collection is the standard data
allowing researchers to search broadly across
set underpinning the journal impact metrics
disparate resources and use citation connections
found in the Journal Citation Reports and the
to navigate to relevant research results.
institutional performance metrics found in InCites.

Databases covered • Science Citation Index Citation Indexes include the WoS Core Collection
• Social Sciences Citation Index plus the following:
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index • BIOSIS Citation Index
• Conference Proceedings Citation Index • Chinese Science Citation Database
• Book Citation Index • Russian Science Citation Index
• Emerging Sources Citation Index • SciELO Citation Index
• Data Citation Index

Subject and regionally specialized indexes:

• Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews

• CABI: CAB Abstracts and Global Health
• FSTA—the food science resource
• Inspec
• KCI—Korean Journal Database
• Medline
• Zoological Record

Other resources:

• Current Contents Connect

• Derwent Innovations Index (patents)
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Web of Science
Table 1. (continued )

Web of Science Web of Science

Core Collection Platform
Number of journals > 20,900 journals plus books and conference > 34,200 journals plus books, proceedings,
proceedings patents, and data sets

Coverage • Over 75 million records • 155 million records ( journals, books,

• More than 101,000 books and proceedings)
• Over 8 million conference papers • 39.3 million patent families (> 70 million patents)
• 7.3 million data sets

Time period covered Sciences: 1900–present Journal literature: 1800–present

Social Sciences: 1900–present Patents: 1963–present

Arts & Humanities: 1975–present Full cited reference indexing for all WoS Core
Collection content
Proceedings: 1990–present
Citation indexing for SciELO, Russian Science
Books: 2005–present Citation Index, Chinese Science Citation Index, and
BIOSIS Citation Index
Emerging Source Citation Index: 2005–present
All content includes times cited for citations from
WoS Core Collection and platform Citation Sources

Author indexing All authors from all publications are indexed. WoS Core Collection: All authors are indexed for
all publications.
Authors linked to affiliations from 2008–forward.
Other resources: Author indexing varies by resource.
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Web of Science
Institution indexing All author affiliations are indexed. Author affiliation indexing varies by collection.

Institution’s variants and parent/child

relationships are mapped and connected to
a preferred institutional name through a
manually curated process that is increasingly
global in coverage.

Updating frequency Daily (Monday through Friday). Each collection is updated on its own schedule,
ranging from daily to monthly.

Citation analysis Citation counts, and author h-index calculations. Citation counts, and author h-index calculations.

“Hot” and “Highly Cited” articles (papers in “Hot” and “Highly Cited” articles (papers in top
top percentiles according to year, field and percentiles according to year, field and document
document types) are available from Essential types) are available from Essential Science Indicators
Science Indicators integration. integration.

Journal Impact Factors and Journal Performance

Quartiles are available via Journal Citation
Reports integration ( JCR Quartiles available
without subscription to JCR).

Controlled vocabulary No. Controlled vocabulary searching is provided

for Medline, Inspec, FSTA, BIOSIS, Zoological
Keyword fields include Author Keywords, and Record.
“Keywords Plus,” which are extracted from the titles
of Cited Articles.

Controlled indexing is provided for institution affiliations

(parent/child mapping).
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Web of Science

interest and importance. Had the database been designed for any of these secondary uses,
many data elements would have been collected, indexed, and structured differently.
Consequently, research analysis using WoS data necessarily makes use of some features that
were designed for information retrieval rather than quantitative analysis.
An example of an “information retrieval” feature is the WoS Subject Categories. These are
254 journal-based categories, each of which represents a specific field or subfield, such as
biotechnology & applied microbiology, family studies, medical laboratory technology, or
quantum science & technology. This categorical scheme was created and developed to enable
information retrieval where a search may be executed or filtered by subject category, and for
this reason a journal may be and often is assigned to more than one subject category. For
quantitative analysis, however, it would be necessary to adjust counts to avoid duplication
of data if collating initially by subject category. Furthermore, contemporary analytic models
may focus on topics that draw on parts of multiple categories.
Nonetheless, it may be claimed that without the SCI, the development of scientometrics
would certainly have been hampered. For 40 years, almost all advances in our understanding
of the global science system and its evaluation and management were based upon these data
sources. As Jonathan Cole has noted, “The creation of the SCI represents a good case study of
how technological innovations very frequently create the necessary conditions for significant
advance in scientific fields” (Cole, 2000). Important early applications of our data include the
adoption of publication and citation indicators for the first Science Indicators produced by the
US National Science Foundation (National Science Board, 1973); their development for this
purpose by Francis Narin and his further research on the citation linkage between the patent
and scholarly literature (Narin, 1976); the pioneering work of Tibor Braun, András Schubert,
and Wolfgang Glänzel of the Information Science & Scientometrics Research Group (ISSRU)
of the Hungarian Academy of Science (Budapest), especially on absolute and relative indica-
tors of national research performance (Braun et al., 1985); similar fundamental research on
measuring and evaluating the comparative performance of universities and groups of re-
searchers by Anthony van Raan, Henk Moed, and others at Leiden University (Moed et al.,
1985); the development of science mapping through cocitation clustering introduced by
Henry Small of ISI and Belver Griffith of Drexel University (Griffith et al., 1974; Small,
1973; Small and Griffith, 1974); and investigations of what the ISI data could reveal concern-
ing the sociology of science, pursued by researchers at Columbia University, including Harriet
Zuckerman, Stephen Cole, and Jonathan Cole, under the direction of Robert Merton (Cole,
2000; Zuckerman, 2018). With the introduction of the journal Scientometrics in 1978, with
Braun as founding editor in chief, SCI data and the field itself became inextricably entwined.
Other databases and more recently developed tools that draw on publication and citation
data from the WoS Core Collection were explicitly designed for quantitative analysis and re-
search evaluation. These include National Science Indicators (1992), US and UK University
Indicators (1995), Essential Science Indicators (2001), and InCites (2010). Typical users of
these products have been university research offices, government agencies, and research fund-
ing organizations. WoS data continue to be used to search and explore publications on a re-
search topic (such as environmental sex determination: Adams et al., 1987) and compare
research activity profiles (for example, that of a country or an institution; see Adams, 2018).

3. ACCESSING WOS DATA TODAY

The WoS group is one of the main business divisions of Clarivate Analytics, a company cre-
ated from the IP & Science division of Thomson Reuters. The ISI is now a research group

Quantitative Science Studies 368

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Figure 1. A wide range of use cases apply to WoS data

within the WoS group. It works closely with the company product and data teams as well as
carrying out its own research, much of which draws on innovative ideas from bibliometric
partners outside the company.
Because we work closely with scientometricians in universities, research funding agencies,
and government departments, we know that researchers conducting advanced scientometric
studies for new knowledge about science and scholarly communication and dynamics or for
policymaking often require a specific set of data in a format that can be analyzed, summa-
rized, and visualized in a different environment. Sometimes the amount of data required can
be downloaded from the WoS platform under an appropriate license. In other cases, the
amount of data needed may exceed what can reasonably be collected from WoS-related
products. In these instances, arrangements for licensed use of custom data may be made.
WoS data are made available to institutions and associated researchers via platforms, APIs,
and custom data set delivery (Figure 1). We have long-established relationships with sciento-
metric research groups in universities around the world, enabling us to draw on their knowl-
edge, advice, and innovative capacity and affording us extensive independent testing and
feedback on our data systems and quality controls. Since the earliest days of ISI, we have rec-
ognized the benefit of these partnerships and have enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with
many partners.
Irrespective of the delivery mechanism, many uses of WoS data are linked to existing insti-
tutional subscriptions, in which case data-use entitlement is linked to the product subscriptions.
Our institutional and partner pricing reflects volumes of data and frequency of delivery required,
alongside a spectrum of use cases from casual to large-scale and commercial data requirements
in support of a substantive contract for a third party, such as a national research funding agency.

3.1. Use Cases

The list of possible use cases for WoS data highlighted below is illustrative, not exhaustive. In
practice, we invest time to understand each request so that we can come up with a solution

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that properly supports our partners and other customers. Each use case may be subject to fees,
terms, and conditions that Clarivate deems necessary and appropriate for such use, but when-
ever possible, the fees associated with academic use are limited to any additional costs
incurred.

Basic usage At the level of individual academic researchers, basic

usage is about primary rights to view, use, and copy
(download and/or print) information from WoS for
individual use and then to distribute and redistribute
small (“insubstantial” in the legal parlance) portions of
the derived summary information in a nonsystematic
(e.g., not a product or service) manner. Creating a
reference list for a journal article is an obvious use,
but studies may have a more applied purpose as well.

Discovery Discovery is another fundamental, core function, which

entails the ability to query WoS data for research purposes
in support of the research process, with appropriate
referencing and accreditation. It is what tens of thousands
of researchers have done on WoS every day for decades.

Analytics Basic usage automatically steps up to an applied level for

any WoS subscriber by giving the user the ability to
download and analyze WoS data for internal use within
the subscribing institution and/or internal business
operations. That means a user can benchmark a research
group against others without needing additional permissions,
thereby demonstrating to a university where it should be
investing.

Integration (APIs only) Here additional permissions may be required. This allows
WoS data and/or analytics to be integrated into an
organization’s own application (either internally developed
or third party) for its internal use, and it is therefore subject
to certain restrictions. If a client does not own or control
the application, the third-party provider of the application
would require a license or approval from the WoS group.

Public use Prior agreement is required where the user is planning to

make WoS data publicly available, by disseminating data
and analysis in reports for an internal website or public-
facing site owned, maintained, and controlled by a
subscriber (usually the researcher’s employer). This
would then also allow for the publication of some summary
results of analysis of WoS data for noncommercial use.

Commercialization Commercial licenses are a higher level use case requiring

formal agreement, and these usually involve clear licensing
of specific data sets, an agreed specification for the way the
data will be used, and a time-limited allowance on data use.
This provides the ability to produce commercial analysis and
reports or incorporate data into a client’s application for
delivery to a third party. However, although this may seem
onerous, it often brings with it additional support for, as
an example, the supply of specific data records and metadata
in a user-specified format.

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The formal terms and conditions of use of WoS data are available on request from the WoS
group at the contact email for this article.

3.2. Data Delivery, Volume, and Frequency

Data may be required as “current” at a point in time, or for a historical period, or data may
need to be regularly updated to a custom cycle. Because citation counts accumulate over
time, and because publication lists grow with new publications, the census date for each data
download is significant. Refreshed data sets will have both more records and revised versions
of historical records.
Whether delivered in custom data sets or via APIs, WoS offers a suite of updating services,
each associated with the delivery tools. Our custom data sets can be updated and re-extracted as
frequently as every two weeks, if necessary, or simply annually. Decisions about the preferred
cycle will depend on the requirements of the associated research activities and outputs. Our
APIs are available in basic, intermediate, and advanced formats, allowing a variety of call speeds
and data volumes, again relative to customer requirements and technical competencies.

3.3. Data for Scientometric Research

Basic access for search and discovery is the standard use case for WoS, and this use is per-
mitted for all product formats and delivery mechanisms.
Researchers may face the challenge that standard products and tools do not fulfill the needs
of their research project. In such cases we encourage our scientometric partners to contact
their designated WoS institutional account manager. Depending on the subscriptions of an
institution, we will endeavor to ensure that individual research groups receive adequate
and timely access to data that further their academic objectives. We review requests, often
with advice and comments from the ISI team, and will respond to the immediate request while
engaging with collections managers to ensure ongoing, long-term, and sustainable access to
research resources.
WoS is committed to supporting high-quality, innovative research uses of our data. In ad-
dition to the search-and-discovery use case, we permit academic analysis and interrogation of
the data for research purposes, subject to the implicit agreement that the analyses are for either
internal or noncommercial research purposes. We also permit data extracts to create training
data sets for use in the development and training of client software applications using math-
ematical and statistical algorithms that automatically identify patterns in data. All potential
uses remain subject to applicable Clarivate terms and conditions, and we expect reasonable
and appropriate credit for the output and content in relevant tables and figures in published
material.

3.4. Applying for Access to Data

As noted, we encourage scientometric researchers to contact their institutional research data

management office in the first instance (usually their institutional library), that typically holds
responsibility for WoS subscriptions. They will then be put in contact with their account man-
ager, who has a technical understanding of individual customer holdings.
The key to make this process simple is to be clear about the required data use and research
objectives. Usually, we ask scientometric partners to provide a brief (e.g., <500 words) sum-
mary outlining the problem they wish to solve. We think that the ability to provide a succinct
summary including these elements is a reasonable test of the seriousness of the researcher’s

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purpose and preparedness. It avoids spending time and effort on trivial, unplanned, and spec-
ulative analysis. The summary should specify the data required to address the problem (i.e.,
why are these the preferred data for that purpose?), an explanation of how progress will be
reported, an outline of likely outcomes in terms of academic research and potential policy
applications, and a description of the likely deliverables. If a specific data extract or download
is required, then charges normally apply to cover company costs and data value. Reductions
and waivers can only be considered where the proposed research use is of evident academic
significance.
Despite these requirements, in many cases, data use does not actually lead to any major
charges. We are asking questions that any proposal to a research funder will already have
covered, and it seems reasonable to check that a data request is properly planned, because
a pipeline of poorly structured requests obstructs delivery to genuine researchers.
Each request is reviewed by ISI to ensure the continuing appropriate and reasonable use of
our data and products. Confirmation of a decision will be made both to the requestor and their
institution.
At this stage, exploratory and test projects are often given a go-ahead with no further re-
quirements. If the project is substantive then, subject to agreement, we usually ask our biblio-
metric partners to do the following:

• Periodically share summaries with ISI, at mutually agreed intervals, of the nature of the
work, the data and analyses used in the project, and any outcomes achieved.
• Alert us of any suspected issues, questions, or discrepancies arising from data use.
• At the end of the project, provide ISI with a report on methodology, data use, findings
and other observations on data and analytics that arose in the course of the work, in-
cluding a short publishable section describing the work and key achievements and suit-
able for a general readership.
• Provide proper attribution to WoS for use of our data, tables and figures, in accordance
with any guidelines shared at the outset of the project or as provided by us from time to
time.
• Share any publications with ISI prior to submission to a journal (we appreciate the op-
portunity to correct any misunderstandings about our data before they appear in print).

Researchers may see these requirements as challenging or even bureaucratic. We see the
reporting process rather differently. It is the basis for a dialogue between ISI staff and the re-
searchers. We work with the data every day, and we can often help to address unexpected
challenges in format or background. We also value alerts about unexpected data problems.
We are delighted to learn what the researchers are doing and happy to offer advice and feed-
back as problems and results emerge.

4. WHO IS USING WOS DATA?

We are very proud that the research activity and publications of the scientometric commu-
nity have, from the earliest days of our company, informed the content and provision of our
data. Although the WoS group and its predecessor organizations, including ISI, have relied
on in-house expertise, such as the research of former Chief Scientist Henry Small and our cur-
rent research staff (e.g., Adams, 2018; Adams et al., 2007; Small, 1973), external researchers
have been the source for advice on many improvements in and extensions of our databases and
analytic systems, for which we are extremely fortunate and grateful.

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As an expression of reciprocal support for the scientometric community, and in apprecia-

tion of the benefits derived from this collaborative research, WoS sponsors professional con-
ferences and offers awards and stipends for researchers. For example, we have, for the last
three years, sponsored an annual Eugene Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation
Analysis, carrying a $25,000 honorarium (http://discover.clarivate.com/garfield-award-2019),
and the Clarivate Analytics Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship (https://www.asist.org/
about/awards/doctoral-dissertation-proposal-scholarship/).

4.1. The Garfield Award for Innovation in Citation Analysis

The Garfield Award is intended to attract applications from scientometric researchers

around the world. It is particularly focused on proposals for innovative uses of the WoS
data, developing novel applications of the citation network and the research indicators
derived from it. Since the beginning of the award program in 2017, we have received
proposals covering topics including scholarly publishing trends, author contributions
and credit, team science, knowledge generation and dissemination, and the science of
science.
Jian Wang (Leiden University) was the 2017 inaugural award recipient. Wang’s research
uses large databases, such as WoS, and advanced statistics to reveal the structures and dynam-
ics underlying science and technology. His recent work explores both the citing behavior of
novel research and how this work is cited, contributing to the important discussion of how
bibliometric indicators can be enhanced to better identify and assess novel and creative schol-
arship. Wang is also interested in the translation of science into innovation, and he uses ref-
erences to scientific literature from within patents to explore this process and examine the
conditions needed for successful translation at the individual, team, and network levels
(Veugelers & Wang, 2019).
The 2018 award recipient was Orion Penner (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
who studies how career success is influenced by the decisions individual researchers make in
allocating research effort across multiple topics, or in selecting a new job or mentor (Peterson
& Penner, 2014). Penner has been using WoS and patent data for some time, and his Garfield
Award submission was an innovative proposal to use natural language processing to measure
where and how research papers in WoS might represent a pivot away from the topics repre-
sented in the paper’s cited references, with the aim of identifying individual publications that
have played a transformative role in scientific discourse.
In 2019, the Garfield Award recipient was Erjia Yan (Drexel University). Yan’s research
program is focused on developing and deploying an entity-based knowledge framework to
study knowledge production and the diffusion of innovations. To build this framework, he
has first been identifying and organizing scientific and technological innovations in large
heterogeneous corpora through entity recognition methods. For his Garfield Award sub-
mission, Yan proposed to examine proximity factors that contribute to knowledge pro-
duction and innovation diffusion by systematically integrating WoS and grant data from
the U.S. National Institutes of Health to study scientist-level productivity and impact (Li
& Yan, 2019).
Through the award program, the recipients may collaborate with ISI researchers on the de-
velopment of existing and new scientometric approaches, with ISI attentive to the ways in
which the research that is being conducted can subsequently be applied by the company
to products and services across WoS.

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4.2. Other Recent Users

As noted, interaction with academic researchers was part of the origins of ISI and growth of the
SCI, and there is continuing use of WoS as a source of data in research publications (Li et al.,
2018; Schnell, 2018). Collaboration between ISI staff and leading academic scientometricians
has led to recent proposals for new journal indicators (Leydesdorff et al., 2019) and new ways
of displaying individual research records (Bornmann et al., 2019). Leading researchers at Ohio
State University have long been elaborating the changing global collaborative landscape
(Wagner et al., 2019), and work with them has enabled the use of WoS data in a major study
on innovation in Chinese research that ISI hopes to support. Although it is beyond the scope of
this paper to provide a comprehensive list of all the many academic groups and research pro-
jects using WoS, the following examples provide a selection of other interesting use cases.

4.2.1. Bibliometric and scientometric research organizations

Among a wide range of globally leading academic centers and service organizations, if we focus
on just one area of northwest Europe, then we see that the Center for Science and Technology
Studies (CWTS), Leiden, Netherlands, the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research,
and Education (NIFU), Oslo, Norway, and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm,
Sweden all use WoS to deliver internal and externally commissioned projects on research and
innovation. These organizations have licensed WoS data to populate an in-house database of
scholarly literature, enhancing the data through additional normalization and transformation to
meet their analytic needs. In addition to project papers and academic articles, they produce
annual statistics and R&D indicators at the national and international levels. CWTS has used
WoS to develop a publicly available university ranking (Leiden Ranking), and it recently inte-
grated bibliometric data with associated metadata to produce novel analyses on the variation of
female authorship across university output. In addition, these groups develop and disseminate
new bibliometric indicators and offer advice on good practice for research assessment.

4.2.2. Academic centers conducting cross-disciplinary research

The Northwestern University Institute on Complex Systems (NICO; Evanston, Illinois), the
iSchool at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana), and the Knowledge Lab at the Uni-
versity of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois) are examples of academic research centers that carry
out cross-disciplinary research projects using WoS to study the dynamics of research and in-
novation and the science of science. In addition to scholarly work, these groups develop and
share “big data” analytic tools with the research community. A recent example of work pro-
duced at these centers includes a study that analyzed WoS data to study the age of cited ref-
erences of highly cited papers (Mukherjee et al., 2017).
In a second example, authors affiliated with several of the above institutions and their col-
leagues used WoS to develop a bibliometric framework for studying mobility of scientists
(Robinson-Garcia et al., 2019). Their framework applies a classification of migrant authors
and traveling authors to researchers and finds that migrant authors have higher citation impact,
despite being less than a third of all mobile authorships. Such large-scale science of science
studies require access to the full WoS data set.

4.2.3. Custom extracts for specialized research purposes

As mentioned, for specialized applications, researchers can license access to WoS subsets to
meet their research needs. For a study on the relationship between research and development

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(R&D) funding and publication productivity for academic chemistry departments in the United
States, economists purchased a custom data set of research articles published in a specific
subset of chemistry journals and for a specific subset of institutions (Rosenbloom et al.,
2015). A Clarivate team representing the WoS worked with the researchers to extract the spe-
cific data set for their purposes, thus ensuring they spent their grant funding on the exact data
set needed for the study. A custom data set can be cost effective for more specialized research
projects, as additional resources are not required to house and maintain the full data set or
extract specific data later, and it is easier to apply regular data updates.
As another example of a fit-for-purpose WoS data set, in 2019 several small custom data
extracts were provided for a research contest to develop Indicators of Technology Emergence
conducted by faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech; Atlanta, Georgia)
and researchers at the analytics firm Search Technologies (Porter et al., 2018). Contest partic-
ipants were challenged to “devise a repeatable procedure to identify emerging R&D topics
within a designated S&T domain” and provided with three practice data sets from three differ-
ence domains: neurodegenerative and dementia medicine, dye-sensitized solar cells, and
smart home. After an initial period to develop their approaches, contest participants were then
provided with a fourth data set on an unknown topic and given 10 days to return the results of
their method for evaluation by contest organizers. The results of the contest were reported at
the 2019 Global Tech Mining conference co-occurring with the 2019 Atlanta Conference on
Science and Innovation Policy.

5. CONCLUSIONS
We welcome inquiries from and engagement with researchers with a serious interest in and
well-developed proposals for the use of WoS data. The content, structure, and detail of WoS
has grown and evolved over more than 50 years, often via beneficial, collaborative enterprise
between ISI, its successor companies, and the research community—through search and dis-
covery across many disciplines and through the analytic work of many talented scientometri-
cians. Partnerships between those interested in the content and value of the rich data in WoS
continue to be an important part of ISI’s work today.

COMPETING INTERESTS
The authors of this paper are Clarivate employees. Clarivate owns the WoS group, which
manages the database discussed in this article.

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