Skip to Main Content

Measuring Research Impact: Using Web of Science to evaluate universities

What is available from Web of Science?

Using Web of Science, you can:

  • Identify the publishing output of institutions or Schools within an institution, and
  • Compare the publication activity of various institutions in a particular subject area

This page shows you the steps to get the above information from Web of Science.

How to identify the publishing output of an institution?

1. Access Web of Science.

2. Perform a "Basic Search". Enter the name of your desired institution in the "Address" field. For example, to search for CityU's publications indexed in Web of Science, type "City Univ Hong Kong".

**Note that to perform a search by institution, you first need to know the abbreviation used by the database. A way to identify the abbreviated name used is to search for a known author who works in your intended institution. Then view the "Address" field in the full record.

 

3. A list of results will be displayed. If the result is less than 10,000 records, a “Create Citation Report” option is displayed for you to create Citation Report for this group of records. For example, you can limit your search results to less than 10,000 records by refining the time period (e.g. 2006-2010), subject area or choosing particular publication types such as “Articles” and “Reviews”.

 

4. The Citation Report for the desired institution will then show the citation data such as the average number of cites per paper and the h-index.

 

For more about Web of Science’s Citation Report and the h-index, refer to the “Impact of Authors” page.

How to compare the publication activity of various institutions in a particular subject area?

1. Access Web of Science.

2. Perform a "Basic Search". Enter the your desired subject in the "Topic" field.

 

3. From the results page, select "Analyze Results" - note that "Citation Report" is not available when there are more than 10,000 search results.

 

4. Select the "Organizations" field to analyze. Set to show the top 500 records.

 

5. A list of organizations and their corresponding record counts are then displayed. You can compare institutions in terms of their publication activity in a particular subject area. Keep in mind that the analysis is only based on publications indexed in Web of Science.