ISI users tracking research evolution

Scientific researchers are increasingly looking to track the evolution of research to decide how to proceed with their own research, according to usage surveys of the ISI Web of Knowledge service.

Thomson Scientific has reported a huge increase in the number of people accessing its ISI Web of Knowledge service; each user is also accessing the resource for longer. More than 54 million user sessions were recorded in 2005, an increase on the 33 million user sessions for 2004. The number of times each user accessed the resource rose by 27% ( Click here for more ISI news ).

Back issues within the Web of Science go back more than 100 years, enabling researchers to trace ideas forwards and backwards in time via cited reference searching, and to learn who has cited their work.

Peggy Dominy, information service librarian for sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said: “The Web of Science Analyze tool lets users track the evolution of research. Before, determining seminal papers and tracking the evolution of research were cumbersome processes; we now have a better picture of how to proceed with our research.”

Louis Houle, director of the Schulich Library of Science and Engineering at McGill University in Canada, said: “Often our researchers need full-text abstracts that date before the 1960s.”

In the UK, more than one million user sessions were recorded at JISC in January 2006. These sessions are increasing at an average of 20% a month, with an average of over three searches during each visit. The UK made the transition from intranet to internet access for ISI Web of Knowledge in May 2005.

ISI Web of Knowledge offers access to integrated scholarly information in the sciences, social sciences and arts. More than 230 disciplines are covered via 22,000 journals, 23 million patents, 12,000 conference proceedings, 5,500 web sites, 5,000 books, two million chemical structures, and scholarly web content via the Web Citation Index ( click here for more information).