Web of Science Database Guide: Guide Home

Coverage: 1900 to present

Covers more than 12,000 high-impact journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as international proceedings coverage for over 150,000 conferences. Includes cited reference searching and Citation Maps (i.e., a graphical representation that shows citation relationships between a paper and other papers).

Basic Search Tips

• Capitalization does not matter: use upper, lower, or mixed case. For example, AIDS, Aids, and aids is treated as the same.
• To search for an exact phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks. For example, the query "energy conservation" will retrieve records that contain the exact phrase energy conservation. This applies only to Topic and Title searches.

• Use parentheses to group compound Boolean operators. For example: (Antibiotic OR Antiviral) AND (Alga* OR Seaweed)  , (Pagets OR Paget's) AND (cell* AND tumor*).

• Search for hyphenated words and phrases by entering the terms with and without the hyphen. For example, speech-impairment finds records containing speech-impairment and speech impairment.

Advanced Searching

• Search Operator Precedence - If you use different operators in your search, the search is processed according to this order of precedence: NEAR/x, SAME, NOT, AND, then OR.
• Apostrophes are treated as spaces, not searchable characters. Be sure to search for variants with no apostrophe. For example, Paget's OR Pagets finds records containing Paget's and Pagets.
• Enter a full or partial grant number. If you enter a partial grant number, end it with the asterisk (*) wildcard. Join multiple grant numbers by the OR Boolean operator.

Author Identifiers

• An author identifier is a Web of Science ResearcherID number or ORCID. Do not use a wildcard (* ? $) in your search query as the system may return unpredictable results.

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