The speaker began the talk by introducing the Web of Science (WoS). The WoS is previously known as ISI (Institute for Scientific Information), Thomson Scientific, Thomson Reuters and the latest one is Clarivate Analytics. All of these are just the same. The WoS is not a full-text database, but just a citation database. There are 21000 total journals in WoS core collection. Clarivate Analysis is neutral; not a publisher and do not plan to become a publisher. Clarivate Analysis does not own journals. They are an information company.
Before the speaker explains more on WoS, she gave four important points needed for the researcher. The first one is time. As a researcher, your time is very crucial. Therefore, everything you do must be strategized. The other three important points are accuracy, novelty, and impact. Novelty is one of the important points because with novelty you can catch others to read your paper. Besides, your research must give impact to society to be recognized and cited by other researchers.
The WoS used citation index to find related papers (old and new). Citation linkages will help you to find related materials efficiently. The WoS used a citation index in which you can navigate both forward citation and backward citation in literature.
The speaker reminded us to read papers from the right journals. From the WoS website, you can sort your findings by using several ways. For example, by using times cited button at the bottom of the page, you will get the most highly cited paper in the top of your results. You can also use the usage count (last 180 days) button to get the papers that have been used in the past six months. Moreover, from the paper’s references, you can get the link of the papers cited in the paper. But some paper from the list of references doesn’t have a link. That’s mean this paper is not indexed the WoS. You can still see how many have been cited for the paper, even you can’t get the link of the paper from WoS.
You can also put many topics/keywords in your search. This can help to narrow your results. For example, if you want to search for anything related to the commuting graph and metabelian group, you only need to type metabelian group COMMUTING GRAPH. Then, WoS will help to list out the papers that contain only these two topics. Besides, we can also use create citation report section to get the citation report in the graph. The speaker mentioned that we can put this citation report in the grant proposal.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) comes out once a year and release the reports every June. As written before, Clarivate Analysis is neutral; not a publisher and do not plan to become a publisher. Besides, Clarivate Analysis does not own journals. They are an information company. This makes JCR rankings are unbiased.
Some viable publishing strategies shared by the speakers:
1) To find government-accredited journals = refer to Malaysian citation index published by MOE.
2) To find internationally recognized journals = use WoS or JCR to find high-quality international journals.
3) To find a journal with high rank and prestige = find journal ranking and quartiles in JCR.
4) To get cited very quickly = Use “immediacy index” metric in JCR.
5) To find journals that get cited for a long time = use “Cited Half-Life” metric in JCR.
Some other points shared by the speakers as follows:
1) From InCites Journal Citation Report, we can get the list of journals for Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. We can get the information on how many issues published per year by those journals.
2) Journal Impact Factor is to see that journal performance, especially for Q4 journal. The speakers reminded us to always aim for Q1, Q2 or Q3 journal and do not aim for Q4 journals. It is because if they are not performed, they will not be in the WoS anymore.
3) Please read and understand the journal to know the style of writing, the paper that they publish, and the style to convey the results.
4) “Journal relationship” is to see a journal relation with other journals.
5) Do not aim for a journal that always does self-cited journals (different journals, but same publishers).
6) https://isindexing.com/isi/index.php Be careful with this website! They are using the same abbreviation as ISI, but this is not a true website.
There are two new things that mentioned by the speaker (some of you maybe have used it before):
1) Kopernio
– We can install Kopernia for free from kopernio.com. Kopernio will help you to identify the legal full-text and help to search open-access database. Kopernio will automatically show you the open-access pdf. For example, if you search any paper in google scholar, Kopernia will show the button view pdf for you to automatically get the open-access pdf.
2) Publons
– We can create Publons account for free from publons.com. Publons is created by Claviate Analysis. Publons is like a linkage for researchers. You can check your publications performances through your Publons account. Publons will automatically set your info from WoS. This platform will also help you to find the researchers and you can know where this researcher publish her/her papers.
Article Prepared by Athirah Zulkarnain