Citation database website, research discovery, journals, analytics

Web of Science

Web of Science is a scholarly research website and citation-index platform from Clarivate for finding literature, following citations, evaluating journals, and analyzing research activity.

Official site
webofscience.com is the main public platform domain for Web of Science, while Clarivate hosts product and support information.
Core purpose
Web of Science helps users search scholarly literature, trace cited references, inspect journal coverage, and analyze research output.
Access model
Many Web of Science features are subscription-based through universities, libraries, research institutions, funders, and other organizations.
Web of Science is a scholarly research website and citation-index platform from Clarivate for finding literature, following citations, evaluating journals, and analyzing research activity.View logo on Wikimedia Commons

What Web of Science is

Web of Science is a scholarly research website at webofscience.com and a Clarivate platform for research discovery, citation indexing, author and journal records, and analytics. Researchers use it to find literature, follow references, check publication histories, and understand how scholarly work connects across fields.

Citation indexing

The platform is built around the idea that citations are useful links between research works. A citation index lets a user move backward to earlier sources and forward to later works that cited a record. That makes Web of Science useful for literature reviews, research evaluation, historical tracing, and finding related work that keyword search may miss.

Core Collection and specialty indexes

Web of Science Core Collection is the best-known part of the platform. Clarivate describes it as a curated citation database with editorial selection, consistent indexing, and coverage across disciplines. The wider platform also connects users to specialty collections, journal tools, author records, APIs, analytics products, and other Clarivate research services.

What users do on the website

A typical workflow starts with a search for papers, authors, organizations, journals, or topics. Users can refine by document type, year, field, institution, open access status, citation relationships, and other metadata. From there, they may export records, inspect references, create alerts, or move into analytics tools such as Journal Citation Reports or InCites.

Research analytics

Web of Science data supports analysis of publication output, citations, collaboration, journal influence, institutional research activity, and emerging areas. These signals are helpful when used carefully, but they are not neutral measurements of quality. Coverage, field norms, language, document type, and database selection all affect what the numbers mean.

Strengths and limits

Web of Science is strongest when users need curated citation data, structured bibliographic records, and tools that many research libraries already support. Its limits are important too: access may require a subscription, coverage is selective, and citation metrics can be misread when they are separated from field context and qualitative judgment.

Why it matters

Web of Science matters because citation databases influence how research is discovered, assessed, funded, and remembered. Libraries, researchers, publishers, universities, funders, and policy teams all use citation infrastructure to make decisions. Understanding the platform helps users treat its records as powerful evidence rather than as automatic rankings.

How to read Web of Science records

A good record check looks beyond the headline citation count. Users should note which database or collection supplied the record, whether author and organization names are disambiguated correctly, how references are indexed, whether the document type fits the question, and whether another source such as Scopus, OpenAlex, Crossref, or PubMed gives a different view.

WHOIS domain data

Data pulled: June 1, 2026View current WHOIS record

Domain
webofscience.com
IP address
35.167.150.92
Registrar
MarkMonitor Inc.
WHOIS server
whois.markmonitor.com
Referral URL
http://www.markmonitor.com
Created
April 23, 1997
Updated
March 23, 2026
Expires
April 24, 2027
Nameservers
ns-342.awsdns-42.com (205.251.193.86); ns-1384.awsdns-45.org (205.251.197.104); ns-1010.awsdns-62.net (205.251.195.242); ns-1673.awsdns-17.co.uk (205.251.198.137)
Domain status
clientDeleteProhibited; clientTransferProhibited; clientUpdateProhibited
Registrant contact
Domain Admin, Camelot UK Bidco Limited, London, GB
Technical contact
Domain Admin, domainmanagement [at] clarivate [dot] com