New Scholarly Index Directs Researchers to Valuable Content from Repositories

“We have integrated quality Web content in a consistent way and combined it with the powerful ISI Web of Knowledge capabilities to create an entirely new research approach,” said James Pringle, vice president of development, Thomson Scientific. “The ability to navigate citation pathways forward and backward in time across multiple content types allows researchers to combine precise searching with truly serendipitous discovery.”

Thomson Scientific content editors select only those Web repositories deemed scholarly. This ensures the Web Citation Index delivers only the highest-quality, most-relevant content.

“We apply rigorous evaluation procedures to the freely available Web resources included in Web Citation Index”, said Jim Testa, director of editorial development, Thomson Scientific. Our team, comprised of subject experts from across all scientific disciplines, evaluates the resources and hand picks the repositories for inclusion. Repositories must be authoritative, robust, stable, and appropriately formatted.”

Web Citation Index™ adds unique Cited Reference Searching to Web-based documents, allowing researchers to navigate forward, backward and through the literature to discover related research that would otherwise have been missed. It does this by incorporating ISI Web of Knowledge capabilities with a suite of technologies developed by NEC, including "autonomous citation indexing" tools from the CiteSeer environment. Special software harvests OAI-compliant metadata from the repositories and combines it with full document indexes. The software also collects the citations within the document and instantly links it to the cited document.

The breadth of content available to the researcher within the ISI Web of Knowledge platform is unmatched: over 22,000 journals, 23 million patents, 12,000 conference proceedings, 4,100 Web sites, 5,000 books, 2 million chemical structures, and now scholarly Web content, all anchored by Web of Science and easily searchable through the cross-content search tool.

“Web Citation Index™ is a next generation research solution that builds on our 50 year heritage of citation management,” said Keith MacGregor, executive vice president of Academic and Government Markets, Thomson Scientific. “No other research tool can match the ISI Web of Knowledge breadth, depth and consistency of indexing. Now, we have embraced new technology to bring quality Web-based scholarly content into the solution. As we continue to lead the way with more exciting developments, we will stick to the fundamentals that researchers value the most—authenticity and trust.”