WRS -- Science Citation Index

This week's resource is Science Citation Index, one of the Web of Knowledge databases. SCI indexes more than 5900 scientific journals in a variety of disciplines and is an excellent resource for multidisciplinary topics.

The general search allows searching by topic, author, journal title, and others, multiple terms combinable using AND, OR, or NOT. The advanced search uses field tags, and allows more flexibility. Searches may be restricted to specific language sources, or by document type, and multiple searches may be combined in the Search History section. There is also a browseable author index.

One of the most unique features of the Web of Knowledge databases is the ability to do a cited reference search -- enter an author or an article/book title and SCI will retrieve papers that list that author/work in their works cited lists. This is a very useful tool for tracking the progression of a line of research, or discovering related works and topics.