INFORMAZIONI UNIVERSITARIE

Authors: Jonathan Adams, David Pendlebury and Martin Szomszo. Institute for Scientific Information https://tinyurl.com/utstunl.
In 2019, around 145,000 researchers from, on average, 139 countries working across a diversity of research disciplines interrogated the Web of Science each day to explore research information and discover key literature to inform current research.
In 1981 the Web of Science indexed approximately 500,000 papers (substantive academic articles and reviews) from 6,800 journals; this expanded substantially to 2.5 million papers sourced from 21,300 journals in 2019. This is a deep data resource for a wide range of analytic uses.
There are, however, few studies of how the Web of Science is used as a bibliographic database other than for the purposes of search and discovery. Our analysis shows that Web of Science is the primary source of publication and citation data for the majority of systematic research reviews across a broad range of disciplines and about twice as many research management and evaluation studies as any other source. Web of Science is the primary data source for such work in the USA, China, and most of western Europe. Countries where the Scopus database was more frequently acknowledged include Iran and Italy.
A key beneficiary of structured use of Web of Science bibliographic records are the biomedical researchers who have an established and structured approach to accessing raw material for reviews that inform the development and current state of research topics that are critical to human health and disease control. (F: Executive summary of the report, february 2020).