Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

March/April 2000

THE ISI WEB OF SCIENCE COMES TO UAB

For the UAB community, access to the ISI Web of Science databases is imminent and may already be available as you read this first alert.  If you are familiar with the Institute for Scientific Information and their citation indexes, you may already know how important these resources are to your everyday research.  By using the citation indexes it is possible to take a known, relevant work and find other, more recent papers that cite it.  These resources have now been made more accessible through The Web of Science, which provides a powerful Web interface for accessing the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, and Social Sciences Citation Index.

The Web of Science interface allows you to:
        * Navigate forward, backward, and through the research literature.
        * Link to original article information when you find a cited reference of interest (for those original
           articles covered by the database).
        * Locate all cited authors, not just first authors (for those original articles covered by the database.)
        * Track "times cited" information for articles on a weekly basis through automatic updates.
        * Locate an unlimited number of relevant items which share one or more cited references through
           the Related Records function.
        * Hotlink to first and subsequent generation articles using prior research.

     The ISI Citation Databases collectively index more than 8,000 high quality, peer-reviewed journals cover-to-cover, providing users with complete bibliographic data, searchable author abstracts (when available in the science and social sciences source material), and cited references from the world's most influential journals.
     We hope this short overview will serve as an introduction to the ISI Web of Science,  the latest addition to Lister Hill Library's Virtual Desktop (see article on p. 3).  The Virtual Desktop can be accessed from the library's home page at http://www.uab.edu/lister.