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Web of Science

Exporting WoS Data

If you have access to Web of Science, you will be able to download all the required files to generate the documents with this library. We will need two datasets for each researcher / candidate

  1. A list of all their publications.
  2. A list of all the articles citing the publications.

You can download these by following these steps:

  1. Go to Web of Science and sign in with your institutional login.

  2. Go to Advanced Search, select Author, and enter your name. Preferably enter something like LastName I* with your initial and a little asterisk at the end so that it catches various forms of your first name.

  3. On top of the search results, there should be an Export button. Click it and select Tab delimited file (or some other supported format).

  4. Select all the records you want to export (maximum 500). For the Record Content, select Full Record and Cited References. Click export and save the file somewhere convenient.

  5. Click on the Citation Report button at the top. On the new page, find the Citing Articles section rectangle at the top and click the Total number there (not the Analyze text next to it!).

  6. On the new search results page, perform steps 3+4 again to download all the citations.

Preprocessing

In most cases, the data downloaded from Web of Science will not be perfect. We can perform some simple preprocessing on it to bring it more in line with the following workflows.

First, WoS allows downloading at most 500 entries per export. If you are particularly successful, this will not be sufficient, so you will have to download multiple files. They can be merged together using 

uvtscholarly wos merge \
    --outfile savedrecs.merged.txt \
    savedrecs1.txt savedrecs2.txt

Second, most documents require some form of score or influence factor distributed by UEFISCDI. The journals in those lists all have a valid ISSN (or eISSN) and other metadata. To filter out entries from WoS that cannot be found in the UEFISCDI database, run 

uvtscholarly wos filter \
    --outfile savedrecs.filtered.txt \
    savedrecs.txt

Applying these pre-processing steps is generally recommended, as it will reduce the number of entries in the files and allow for quicker document generation. Note that these documents will be filtered out anyway, if they still appear.

Supported Formats

If you followed the steps from the previous section, you might have noticed that Web of Science supports many different formats. This is intended to be a growing list, but current the following formats are actually supported by the library:

  1. Tab delimited file: this is a standard CSV file that you can open in Excel.
  2. BibTeX: this is a non-standard BibTeX file with many WoS-specific fields.