Workshops Explore the Utility of Big Data from the Web of Science

Over the years, the value of the Web of Science Core Collection as a tool for search and discovery has been established by its use in thousands of institutions around the world. Recently, however, researchers are increasingly turning to the Web of Science to answer larger questions, leveraging the database’s comprehensive depth and wealth of metadata for deeper explorations into the scope and dynamics of research itself.

This “big data” approach to the Web of Science is the subject of a trio of workshops, sponsored by Clarivate Analytics and taking place in three cities. The first was held in Copenhagen, Denmark on June 14th. Sessions will follow in Lausanne, Switzerland on June 20th and in London, UK, on June 22nd. (For the latter two events, registration details for free attendance can be found here.)

During these informal, interactive sessions, members of the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science team, along with customers and partners, will discuss the use of the Web of Science citation network as a research dataset. Customized uses of the data, via application program interfaces (APIs) as well as through integration of Web of Science data with other systems, will also be examined.

At the recent Copenhagen session, for example, Wolfgang Glanzel, director of the Centre for R&D Monitoring at KU Leuven in Belgium, gave a talk on using the Web of Science for bibliometrics and research evaluation. The discussion included combining different kinds of information extracted from the Web of Science, as well as the process of joining such extractions with external sources in order to furnish additional elements to the data.

Another presenter at the event examined the process of combining citation context analysis (based on scrutiny of the text surrounding the citation mark) with Web of Science citation networks. Another talk discussed joining Web of Science data with VIVO, the software tool for representing and tracking an institution’s scholarly activity.

Similar threads of discussion will be pursued at the upcoming workshops in Lausanne and London. For example, in one scheduled presentation in Lausanne, Gaétan de Rassenfosse, Assistant Professor and Holder of the Chair of Innovation and IP Policy at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, will examine non-patent literature (that is, documents and publications that are not patents or patent applications but which are cited as references for being relevant in legal matters pertaining to patent activity). Among other matters, de Rassenfosse will discuss linking citations in patent documents to scientific publications.

Discussion will center on these and other trends in big-data analytics, and how Clarivate is embracing and harnessing them.

For information on registering for the Lausanne and London events, please click here.