Course write up - Web of Knowledge Update Training workshop Nov 2012

This update session focussed on features and enhancements recently applied and also looked at forthcoming features. The event was a mixture of presentations and hands-on practical searching.

I was interested in attending this event because I do not use WoK frequently and needed to know more about it before promoting it further within the Faculty and to the PhD students.

The agenda for the event covered the following topics.

Search engine and navigation enhancements

>> you can now use ‘left-hand truncation’. For example: *saccharide retrieves polysaccharide/sialylsaccharide/eligosaccharide.

Alerting enhancements

>>if you have a personal account for WoK you can now renew all your search and citation alerts simultaneously.

Author identification enhancements – improved author finder tool and ResearcherID now searchable across WoK

>> an updated Author Search option in the Web of Science guides you through a series of steps that are designed to disambiguate common author surnames. You type in a surname and initial; select the author’s research domain and then choose their organisation from the list. This search might be useful if you are looking up an author and you have some background information on them. As a warning, this search is only as good as the information you have available on the author and frankly is rather fiddly.

>> try the Author Search by looking for Stephen Hawking.

Cited reference enhancements

>> the Cited Reference links now display the full reference of the citing article – so it has more in common with the Cited by links in Google Scholar.

ResearcherID and ORCID integration

>>For me, this was the most interesting piece of information gained at the workshop. Researchers can set up a personal ResearcherID (basically a code that is unique to them; the code is attached to all their research output indexed in the WoK). This ResearcherID only works in WoK however a new ID option is gaining popularity – ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID).

ORCID is rapidly becoming the preferred ID option because it can be used across multiple database platforms rather than just WoK.  So if a researcher has an article indexed in WoK or Medline their ORCID will be displayed in both databases – allowing the researcher to get maximum exposure and for readers to follow ORCID links and see the researcher’s full output. ORCID allows researchers to attach their ID to their research output. See http://about.orcid.org/

Introduction to the new Data Citation Index

>>This is a new database in WoK – it provides a single point of access to research data from repositories across disciplines and around the world. Most of these repositories contain data sets such as statistics about ice and snow levels from The National Snow and Ice Data Centre. Essentially it offers access to sets of data which can be used in research. Most (but not all) of the repositories seem to be freely available so the Data Citation Index acts like a resource discovery tool.

>>Apparently there is no standard way to reference data sets so WoK provides a recommended way of citing the data.

In summary

There was a lot of jargon – taxonomic; supatax; DCI record; geospatial field….. this was a little tiring and not something that you could engage students with. The event was not particularly interactive – the group followed the presentation on their computers and then did a short worksheet. We sat in regimented rows and I only managed to speak to two other people! However, it was comforting to see that live demos can be problematic for everyone – search results looking different and resources on a go-slow.

I’m not convinced that undergraduate students would find this level of detail useful however there are some items that will be relevant to the PhD students  – I will be investigating the ORCID scheme further as this seems most relevant to the students I support.