Antecedentes

Web of Science is currently accessed through Web of Knowledge. This may appear as in Figure 7.3. It is not possible in the limited space available here to show you all its different facilities. Once you have tried out one or two basic literature searches you may wish to explore its other capabilities. Find out from your college library whether you can access it and, if so, how to do so. Once you are logged into Web of Knowledge and have selected ISI Web of Science, the home page shown in Figure 7.4 will appear.

Quick Search is sufficient in most cases. To restrict your search you may wish to de-select the Arts & Humanities Citation Index and, possibly, the Science Citation Index

FIGURE 7.3 ISI Web of Knowledge home page (from Thomson Reuters)

FIGURE 7.4 ISI Web of Science home page (from Thomson Reuters)

Expanded by clicking on the box containing the tick mark. If too many inappropriate references come up when the number of databases is not restricted, then go back and limit your search.

Enter the key words or terms that describe the topic that you want to conduct the search on. If too many references are found, limit your search by adding further keywords.

There is a help facility if you want more information on what to do. Suppose you want to find out what articles there are on the topic of interpersonal attraction and attitude similarity. You type in these terms in the box provided combining them with the word or search operator ‘and’. Then press the Return key or select the Search option.

The first part of the first page of the Summary of the results of this search is shown in Figure 7.5. Of course, if you search using these terms now you will get newer publica-tions than these as this example was done in April 2010. Articles are listed in order of the most recent ones unless you have selected them in order of the highest relevance of the keywords. This option is shown in the Sort by box in Figure 7.5. With this option articles containing more of these terms and presenting them closer together are listed first.

Four kinds of information are provided for each article listed in the summary:

z the family name of the authors and their initials;

z the title of the article;

z the name of the journal together with the volume number, the issue number in parentheses, the first and last page numbers of the article, and the month and the year the issue was published; and

z the number of times the article has been cited by other papers.

FIGURE 7.5 ISI Web of Science first summary page of the results of search (from Thomson Reuters)

If your library has this software, just below this last entry may be the SFX icon. Selecting this icon enables you to find out whether your library has this journal. The use of this procedure is described below.

For the first article shown in Figure 7.5, the authors are Lemay, Clark and Greenberg.

The title of the article is ‘What Is Beautiful Is Good Because What Is Beautiful Is Desired:

Physical Attractiveness Stereotyping as Projection of Interpersonal Goals’. The journal is Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

It does not seem possible to tell from the title of this article whether it is directly relevant to our topic as the title does not refer to attraction. To see whether the article is relevant and to find out further details of it we select the title which produces the Full Record shown in Figure 7.6. The keyword ‘interpersonal attraction’ is listed as one of the Author Keywords and ‘attitude similarity’ as one of the KeyWords Plus. From the Abstract it would seem that this paper is not directly concerned with interpersonal attraction and attitude similarity and so we would be inclined to look at some of the other references.

Web of Science includes the references in the paper. To look at the references select References near the top of the full record as shown in Figure 7.7.

If you have this facility, select the SFX icon in Figure 7.6 just below the title of the paper to find out whether your library has this paper. SFX may produce the kind of web page shown in Figure 7.8. We can see that Loughborough University Library has access to the electronic version of this paper. If we select Go the window in Figure 7.9 appears.

We can now read and download this article (Figure 7.10). We can search for our two keywords by typing them in the Find box towards the top of the screen. If we do this we can see that this paper does not look at the relation between interpersonal attraction and attitude similarity.

FIGURE 7.6 ISI Web of Science full record of an article (from Thomson Reuters)

FIGURE 7.7 ISI Web of Science cited references of an article (from Thomson Reuters)

FIGURE 7.8 SFX window (from Loughborough University Ex Libris Ltd)

There are several ways of saving the information on Web of Science. Perhaps the easiest method is to move the cursor to the start of the information you want to save, hold down the left button of the mouse and drag the cursor down the page until you reach the end of the information you want to save. The address is useful if you want to contact the authors. This area will be highlighted. Select the Edit option on the bar at the top of the screen which will produce a dropdown menu. Select Copy from this menu.

Then paste this copied material into a Word file.