Library Briefings

New backfiles for top science source

Web of Science content now available back to 1955

For a number of years, one of the most popular and heavily used bibliographic databases at Northwestern has been Web of Science, available at http://isi4.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi/wos/. This database is unique in that it provides wide coverage of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, as well as citation indexing -- the ability to search for publications that have been cited by later articles. The Library has now added to its Web of Science access by purchasing additional backfiles: As of September 2004, our ability to search the science and social science literature on Web of Science extends back to 1955, rather than to 1965, as has been the case until now.

For example, a Northwestern researcher can now search for the classic 1960 paper “Alumina: catalyst and support. 1.” by Northwestern chemist Herman Pines in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and find all 358 papers that have cited that paper from 1960 through 2004. Using the same database, a Northwestern user could search for the 1958 paper “Common fate, similarity, and other indexes of the status of aggregates of persons as social entities” by famed Northwestern social psychologist Donald T. Campbell in the journal Behavioral Science and retrieve the 210 papers that have cited it from 1958 to 2004.

--Bob Michaelson