Getting Started

The Web of Science (WoS) is a suite of multidisciplinary databases from Clarivate Analytics, part of its Web of Knowledge. Access it through a Harvard Library website in order to connect to the full-text articles that Harvard has licensed.

Below are more details and a list of the databases within Web of Science.

Web of Science Databases

When you open the Web of Science, first choose which databases to search. The default is the Core Collection (a multi-disciplinary science database), but you can use the pull-down menu to select All Databases for a broad search or a specific database for more focused research.

The databases are listed below, with their Web of Science descriptions.  Note that the years of coverage for each database are different. 

  • BIOSIS Citation Index (1926-present). Life sciences and biomedical research covering pre-clinical and experimental research, methods and instrumentation, animal studies, and more. 
  • BIOSIS Previews (1969-present). Life sciences and biomedical research covering pre-clinical and experimental research, methods and instrumentation, animal studies, and more. 
  • CABI : CAB Abstracts® (1910-present). Provides authoritative research information on agriculture, environment and related applied life sciences. 
  • Current Contents Connect (1998-present). Complete tables of contents and bibliographic information from the world’s leading scholarly journals and books; also includes relevant, evaluated Web sites and documents. 
  • Data Citation Index (1900-present). Discover research data, including data studies, data sets from a wide range of international data repositories and connect them with the scientific literature to track data citation. 
  • Derwent Innovations Index (1963-present). Value-added patent information from Derwent World Patent Index® as well as patent citation information from Patents Citation Index®. 
  • KCI-Korean Journal Database (1980-present). Provides access to articles from multidisciplinary journals covered in KCI. KCI is managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea and contains bibliographic information for scholarly literature published in Korea. 
  • MEDLINE® (1950-present). The U.S. National Library of Medicine® (NLM®) premier life sciences database. This is the database featured in PubMed.
  • Russian Science Citation Index (2005-present). Access bibliographic information and citations to scholarly articles from Russian researchers in over 500 science, technology, medical, and education journals. Leading publications have been carefully selected and provided by the Scientific Electronic Library (eLIBRARY.RU), Russia's largest research information provider. 
  • SciELO Citation Index (1997-present). Access to scholarly literature in sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities published in leading open access journals from Latin American, Portugal, Spain and South Africa. 
  • Web of Science Core Collection (1900-present) Search the world’s leading scholarly journals, books, and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
  • Zoological Record (1864-present). The world’s leading taxonomic reference and oldest continuing database of animal biology.