| Web of Science General Information / Comparisons with other databases |
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Web of Science consists of a number of databases, two of the most significant databases, and the two which we subscribe to at Creighton are: 1) Science Citation Index, and 2) Social Science Citation Index.
The Science Citation Index (SCI) is a multidisciplinary index to the journal literature of the sciences. It fully indexes 5,900 major journals across 150 scientific disciplines. Some of the disciplines covered include:
- Agriculture
- Astronomy
- Biochemistry
- Biology
- Biotechnology
- Chemistry
- Computer Science
- Materials Science
- Mathematics
- Medicine
- Neuroscience
- Oncology
- Pediatrics
- Pharmacology
- Physics
- Plant Sciences
- Psychiatry
- Surgery
- Veterinary Science
- Zoology
The Social Sciences Citation Index(SSCI) is a multidisciplinary index to the journal literature of the social sciences. It fully indexes more than 1,725 journals across 50 social sciences disciplines, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 3,300 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals. Some of the disciplines covered include:
- Anthropology
- History
- Industrial Relations
- Information Science & Librarianship
- Law
- Linguistics
- Philosophy
- Political Science
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Social Issues
- Social Work
- Sociology
- Substance Abuse
- Urban Studies
- Women's Studies
MEDLINE vs WEB of SCIENCE:
Subjects Covered
The Medline (PubMed) database covers the biomedical sciences, clinical medicine, nursing, dentistry and scholarly journals from other health professions. The number of journals indexed is approximately 4,800. While Web of Science covers more journals, its coverage is spread over a much wider range of disciplines and does not provide the depth of coverage in the health and biomedical sciences that Medline does.
Publication Types
Medline indexes journal articles, reviews, editorials, letters to the editor, and some news articles from the journals it covers. Medline does not index meeting abstracts, especially those issued in supplements to a journal.
SCI and SSCI index the complete contents of the journals they cover including all the meeting abstracts.
Summary:
- Medline provides a greater depth of coverage in the health sciences when compared to WoS. It also includes full subject indexing using MeSH, which greatly enhances topical subject searching.
- WoS provides citation indexing, which is a valuable feature that is not available in Medline and which compliments the traditional keyword approach to searching.
- WoS is multidisciplinary database and can provide citations not found in Medline.
- WoS includes citations for meeting abstracts, which are sometimes an important source of current research information.
CINAHL vs WEB of SCIENCE (SCI / SSCI):
CINAHL covers the literature of Nursing, Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and other health professions. It covers a much greater range of titles in those disciplines than does SCI or SSCI. Because these health professions also draw on the literature in other fields (psychology, education, sociology) the multidisciplinary coverage provided in WoS will complement results obtained from CINAHL; however, more complete coverage would be provided using a database specific to those disciplines.
CINAHL also indexes some books. WoS does not.
CINAHL records do include references, so CINAHL also provides a form of citation searching. As a rule of thumb, a thorough citation search in the fields of nursing, o.t., or p.t. should include both the CINAHL and WoS databases.
Additional information is available on these pages:
- Search tools (search operators, truncation, etc.)
- Record Structure, Fields & Subject Indexing
- Cited Reference Searching
Creighton University
Health Sciences Library and Learning Resources Center
2500 California Plaza
Omaha, Nebraska 68178
voice: 402-280-5108 fax: 402-280-5134
Author: Richard Jizba, ©
2000 Creighton University