Accessing Web of Science Data @ Dartmouth
Through a Dartmouth Library subscription Dartmouth faculty, students and researchers may access the Web of Science database, which indexes and contains metadata from over 22,000 academic journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
With this subscription, Dartmouth community members may access Web of Science data in three different ways:
- Through the Web of Science web interface - accessible from campus or with a Dartmouth VPN.
- Using the Web of Science Starter API
- With the Web of Science SQL database
Each of these options presents different opportunities and challenges.
The web interface allows the easiest and quickest access. You can perform simple or advanced searches, then export the metadata from your results. You may export between 500 and 1000 records at a time (depending on the format of exported documents you choose: Excel, plain text files, tab-delimited files, etc.). Most researchers will probably prefer this method as it is by far the easiest to begin (no special access requests required nor programming knowledge needed).
For faster access to the dataset that can be automated, you can try the Web of Science Starter API. For those with programming experience in Python, view our instructions for getting started. Others, who may need help getting started with this API, may contact Dartmouth Library's Research Facilitation department for advice or to make an appointment. This method is ideal for administrators and researchers who want to regularly access basic author- and document-level WoS data and would like a way to automate this data retrieval.
Finally, the most comprehensive way to access this dataset is through the Library's Web of Science SQL database (which was converted into SQL from xml). To learn more, review its licensing conditions, and request access to this database please visit our Web of Science SQL database page. Best for researchers who would like to automate the retrieval of WoS data but want to access data fields not accessible with the Starter API (abstracts and references are not provided by the available APIs, for example). Note: this is a static dataset with no entries after the first couple weeks of January 2023. If you need up-to-date data, this option will not work for you.
To add to the confusion, each of these data access points offers access to different data fields within the WoS database (and sometimes under different names). Please use our guide to Web of Science data fields and their availability for the different means of access discussed above.
Comparison of Dartmouth Library's Web of Science data products
Features Comparison Table
| Web Interface | Starter API | SQL Database (built from xml) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access Requirements | web browser |
|
|
| Data Available | |||
| Simple Metadata (author, title, data, WoS / ISSN/ DOI ids) |  |
|
|
| Date Range | to present | to present | up to mid-January 2023 |
| keywords | |
|
|
| content summary (Abstract, Research Areas / WoS Categories) | |
|
|
| Citation Information | (Articles Cited)* |
(Articles Cited) |
|
| Data Extraction / Limits |
Export 500-1000 records at a time (but only up to 100,000?) |
5000 requests per user per day with 50 records / request (250,000 records / day max) |
Unlimited |
| Search Fields |
Simple or advanced searches (by author, title, keyword, abstract, year, funding agency, etc.) |
Simple or advanced searches (by author, title, keyword, abstract, year, funding agency, etc.) |
All fields |
|
Possible Use Cases |
|||
| Citation Analysis | |
|
|
| Filter or compare results by discipline or subject area | |
|
|
| automate retrieval of author / journal / subject area scholarship | |
||
| automate retrieval of impact (citation frequencies, etc.) | |
||
| analysis of use of specific terms in title and abstract | |
|
|
| full-text analysis | <-- see cell to the left |
* can view list of citing articles too, but not available for export