Mat-Su College: Biology

Web of Science has many articles about the sciences. It has many features to let you find exactly what you want. It is a good place for in-depth scientific research, though you may want to begin your research with Academic Search Premier.

One nice feature of Web of Science is that you can sort your search results in a lot of ways.  For example, you can sort your results but how often those items have been cited.

To do this, click the "Sort by:" drop-down menu and choose "Citations: Highest first":

Just remember that old articles -- even bad ones -- have had plenty of time to get cited. Good but brand new articles haven't had that chance. How often something is cited is in part a function of time. But it's still an interesting way to look at your results.

Web of Science has tons of ways for you to find exactly what you want.

At the search results screen, the entire left hand column is devoted to checkboxes you can click to filter down to exactly what you want.

Some of these filters are useful:

• Web of Science categories: Web of Science categorizes articles by subject. For instance, in a search for "ocelots," I could narrow to either biodiversity conservation or evolutionary biology. These two different subject categories will give me a very different set of results about ocelots.
• Document Types: You can limit your results by type of document. Web of Science includes tons of types of documents: articles (what you typically want), abstracts of meetings, book reviews, letters, poems, software reviews, and so on.
• Countries/Regions: helpful if you want to focus on particular countries.

Web of Science lets you limit your search results to data sets.

On the left, click the "Associated Data" checkbox underneath "Quick Filters:"