Global voices, one network: Expanding the Web of Science platform with Research Commons
To enable flexible discovery and comprehensive research evaluation, the Web of Science platform now provides expanded content for customers in the new Research Commons database.
Since the launch of the Science Citation Index in 1964, scholarly communication has transformed significantly. As the volume of the world’s research has grown, publishing practices and norms have also evolved. Macro-level disruptions such as the shift from print to digital, rise of open research, and regional initiatives to boost science and technology have come with benefits and drawbacks. Although 48% of the world’s recent research papers are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection, the research community must collaborate across sectors to meet widespread calls for increased bibliodiversity while reckoning with emerging threats to research integrity.
At Clarivate, we recognize the need to connect more of the world’s research in a single citation network while preserving the hallmark selectivity and curation our customers rely upon in the Web of Science Core Collection to support research excellence. Today, we are launching Research Commons on the Web of Science platform, a separate, comprehensive collection of journal output from open metadata sources.
“Research Commons includes more research from researchers and journals in the Global South, helping increase the visibility of important topics and enabling researchers to better demonstrate their impact.”
Expanded, enriched content to understand the broader research landscape
For decades, we have continuously expanded the Web of Science platform to include more journals and more research output types to meet researchers’ evolving needs. For example, we created the world’s first Data Citation Index in 2012, expanded the journals covered in the Core Collection in 2015 with the Emerging Sources Citation Index, and more recently added preprints, dissertations, awarded grants, and policy documents to the platform.
Our expansion strategy has consistently followed two guiding principles:
- Curated growth within the Core Collection — adding sources that meet our rigorous editorial standards to support efficient discovery and reliable analytics.
- Strategic breadth through complementary databases — enhancing the platform to support use cases such as systematic review that require additional breadth.
This balanced approach ensures that the research community can rely on the Web of Science to provide both a curated set of trusted content in the Core Collection, and a broader view of the research landscape across the platform.
The introduction of Research Commons marks another step forward in responsibly expanding the Web of Science universe. Searchable alongside the Core Collection in All Databases, Research Commons provides:
- Expanded content: More than 32 million documents published in journals in the last 10 years sourced from open platforms, starting with Crossref and OpenAlex at launch— increasing the amount of journal content discoverable on the platform by 21%
- Global and disciplinary breadth: 53% of content is from researchers in the Global South, and 43% is in the social sciences, arts and humanities
- More open access content: 39% of content is published via open access models
“The initiative to increase bibliodiversity and significantly expand the content within a quality framework is absolutely welcomed and will undoubtedly enrich the research landscape.”
Flexible discovery to meet different research needs
While considering this expansion, we consulted librarian customers worldwide, who confirmed that the Research Commons content set is a welcome addition to the platform. In addition, customers shared that they value the selectivity that Core Collection delivers, and maintaining the boundary between databases is also important.
“Adding more to Web of Science is always going to be a good thing, as long as people can get to the data that they want.”
Research Commons is a separate database that is not part of the Core Collection. The Core Collection will continue to serve the community as a trustworthy, bounded index of sources that have undergone rigorous evaluation by a publisher-neutral team of experts. However, several use cases may require a wider view of the literature:
- Researchers need to identify experts in more regions for potential collaboration.
- Librarians need to analyze where faculty are publishing to make collection management decisions.
- University leaders need to understand the full picture of their research output to inform their strategic direction.
With the addition of Research Commons, platform-wide Web of Science searches now return more results, and users can continue to filter results by database to prioritize quality or breadth based on the task at hand. For researchers, Research Commons enhances visibility — especially for work in underrepresented fields and regions — and provides more connection points across the Web of Science citation network. University leaders and librarians can analyze publishing trends across disciplines and regions, identify emerging collaboration opportunities, and make more informed strategic decisions.
We collaborated with customers to shape how Research Commons content is presented, designing the user experience based on their feedback. Because some Research Commons content may not be peer-reviewed, the default setting in All Databases search excludes it from results — users must choose to include it as they do for Preprint Citation Index content.
Figure 1: Web of Science platform search results exclude Research Commons content by default
Research Commons records are linked to the Web of Science citation network, providing more connection points and pathways to uncover related research. At the record level, citations are recorded for each database so that users can continue to rely on metrics derived from trusted Core Collection content alongside metrics derived from additional databases, including the Research Commons.
Figure 2: Research Commons record for a paper with 15 citations across the Web of Science platform
The next steps for responsible, comprehensive evaluation
Beyond flexible discovery, increasing coverage on the Web of Science platform also enables comprehensive analytics. Researchers will have the ability to add Research Commons publications to their profiles. Furthermore, to complement the trusted metrics we currently provide on profiles, which aggregate Core Collection data, we plan to introduce new, distinct indicators for full platform content across all databases in the future.
As we analyzed the metadata available via open platforms, we found that it does not match the level of completeness and accuracy that Core Collection data offer. Thorough indexing policies and processes have been consistently applied to Core Collection content for 60 years, resulting in a high-quality dataset. Without that historical investment, it is difficult for newer resources to achieve the same level of quality. However, by leveraging our organization unification and data linking expertise, we are enriching the metadata available in Research Commons to ensure it is fit for institutional evaluation purposes and can be added to researcher profiles in an automated way. Nonetheless, while suitable for broader discovery, shortcomings in the metadata available for this expanded corpus will limit its relevance for certain analytics use cases and require a separate set of indicators to assess its influence and impact.
As the research landscape evolves, the needs of researchers, librarians, and leaders evolve with it —and the Web of Science continues to rise to the challenge, innovating while staying true to its trusted foundation. Our expanded content and profiles will enable the community to advance a new era of research discovery and assessment.
Register for a webinar to see a live demo and learn more about Research Commons.
