SOC 397 Social Research Methods: Web of Science

• Quotation marks searches the database for those words together as a term
• An asterisk (*) searches the database for that word plus any variants of the root word.
• Use the OR search fields to search for synonyms
• Use the limits to filter for a particular source type

This tutorial will demonstrate fairly advanced searching in Web of Science. The most important thing to note is that you should search with synonymous or related terms with "OR". 

Web of Science includes three citation indices:

• Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) 
• Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) 
• Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) 

You can select to search only the SSCI from the main search page, under "more settings".

Once you've identified an article in a database and you want to the full text, click on the green Find It @ PSU button to see if the article is available from journals in the Library (electronic and print). If you see an Online Access link, you can click to access the electronic copy.