I. Sources for Locating Journal Articles, continued.
 Web
of Science
Web of Science is composed of three sections:
Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts
& Humanities Citation Index. Between these three parts, virtually
all areas of scholarship are covered, providing bibliographic information
and some abstracts from articles from more than 5,700 journals in
the sciences, more than 1,700 in the social sciences, and more than
1,100 in the arts and humanities.
Unlike PsycINFO, Web of Science does not
have a subject thesaurus, making it difficult to use Web of Science
to locate articles by topic. Instead, Web of Science captures the
references listed in each indexed paper and allows users to search
these cited references. This extremely powerful feature lets you
trace an article from its publication through subsequent mentions
by other authors. This can be useful in assessing the impact of
a particular article or researcher and can provide insight on how
a topic has been treated over time.
For example, let's perform a cited reference search
for this article, found using PsycINFO.
To perform a cited reference search, launch
Web of Science and select the Full Search option. You'll be taken
to the Full Search/Date & Database Limits screen.
You will want to search in the Science and Social
Sciences databases simultaneously to get the best coverage for Psychology
journals. Uncheck the box next to Arts & Humanities Citation
Index. You may also choose to limit your search to particular time
period. In our example, the article we are tracing was published
in 1998, so there will be no references to it in the years prior
to 1998. Selecting a narrower range of dates for your search can
make Web of Science produce results more quickly. Once you've selected
your databases and date range, click the "Cited Ref Search"
button.
The Cited Reference Search allows you to use up
to three criteria: author, work (i.e. journal), and year. I find
the Cited Work search to be quite difficult because instead of full
titles this field contains journal title abbreviations, many of
which are difficult to figure out. Instead, I recommend filling
in the author and year lines. It should be fairly easy to see on
the results list you retrieve the exact match for the article you
are trying to trace.
Enter author's names with the last name first
followed by first and middle initials, if known. In our example,
we've entered the lead author's name, Michael Siegal, as siegal
m*. We've used the asterisk for his middle initial since we
don't know what it is.
Once you've entered all your search criteria,
click the "Lookup" button.
Web of Science found 18 references matching our
search criteria. The one we are looking for is the third one from
the top: the Cited Work is DEV PSYCHOL, Volume 34, starting on page
332. The database indicates that this paper has been cited 6 times
in other papers since its publication. To see citations for those
papers, check the box next to the correct reference and then click
the  button.
To see more information about an article, click
on its title. Let's look, for example, at the first one listed above.
You'll see most of the same information as you
would if you located this article in PsycINFO, but it includes a
few unique items, including the link for "Cited References."
Clicking this link will show you the bibliography for this paper.
It will include the original paper that you were tracing; in our
example, the paper by Siegal is included.
Locating Print
and Electronic Journals
Julie Borden
Electronic Reference Coordinator
847-491-2176
j-borden@northwestern.edu
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