Web of Science

As a class we recently had a short assignment that had us exploring the various resources and ways to manipulate data in the ISI Web of Science. The recent assignment was generally fun and straight forward. Several classmates had used the ISI Web of Science as a research tool for this project. Unfortunately my recent sojourn into ISI Web of Knowledge and Web Science was rather frustrating and confusing. Perhaps someone out there can explain what went wrong.

ISI Web of Knowledge
My first search in the Web of Knowledge (all databases) for Asner G yielded 14 records. These results included articles, meetings/proceedings, reviews and book. However when I searched on Anser G* there were 165 records. A source title analysis of these records found that the top two journals were Remote Sensing of Environment, and Ecosytems. Of the 165 records, 145 were in the Science + Technology subject.

Web of Science
An author search on Asner yielded 226 records. Two distinct author sets were selected to further refine the results. A distinct author set is a “discovery tool showing sets of papers likely written by the same author.” This reduced the number of records to 56. A subject area analysis of the records indicated that the articles/proceedings fell into the following categories: environmental sciences, ecology, and geosciences, multidisciplinary. The source title analysis found the top three were Ecological Applications, Global Change Policy, and Remote Sensing of Environment. Now here is where things get strange. I did another search on Asner G and only got 4 records. When I searched on Asner G*, I got 78 records (a bit more than the 56 above). The subject area analysis broke down to environmental sciences, ecology and remote sensing.

A citation report on Asner G* had total of 1,234 citations (930 when self-citations were removed). The most cited article was “Global Consequences of Land Use” published in Science (July 2005). More data gleaned from the citation report showed that Greg Asner published the most in 2004 and that 2008 had the most citations. The h-index was 16. The h-index or Hirsch-index measures not only the quantity of citations, but the quality of the publications. The h-index “helps to identify distinguished scientists, whose publications are constantly highly cited, as long as the author mostly publishes in a single discipline” (Tenopir, 2007). The combination of remote sensing (topic) and Asner (author) netted 39 results. The source titles included Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, Remote Sensing of Environment, Ecological Applications, Global Change Biology and several more.

ISI Web of Knowledge. http://access.products.com/educate

Tenopir, C. (2007). Measuring impact and quality. Library Journal, 132 (14), 30.

Thoughts
So what does all this mean? Well, first when doing an author search the name is very important. It appears that better search results are netted when an asterick is used with the author’s name. Limiting a search by topic and author will reduce the number of results. The citation report is a nifty feature; depending on how long the scientist has been publishing one could track how quickly articles impact the field. Finally, the subject areas reported confirm that Greg Asner work is multidisciplinary in nature and in reporting. As for my experiments with ISI, some tutorials and further experimentation will be needed to really get the hang of this database. This just in according to a posting on the class discussion board the simpler the search the better the results. One should search on the primary author and not the co-authors for an article. However, I am still mystified about the variety of results for Asner, Asner G and Asner G*.

Next blog – Bits, Bytes, and a little housekeeping