Discover the world’s most influential social sciences journals with Social Sciences Citation Index
Go to product Contact usSocial Sciences Citation Index™ contains over 3,400 journals across 58 social sciences disciplines, as well as selected items from 3,500 of the world’s leading scientific and technical journals. More than 9.37 million records and 122 million cited references date back from 1900 to present.
Our expert in-house editors use a single set of 28 criteria throughout the journal selection and curation process. Divided into 24 ‘quality’ criteria and four ‘impact’ criteria, our editors select the most influential journals in their respective fields (using citation activity as the primary indicator of impact) for the Social Sciences Citation Index.
Our process of curation is unique
Editorial decisions are conducted by our expert in-house editors, who have no affiliations to publishing houses or research institutes. Using objectivity, selectivity, and collection dynamics as the basic principles of our selection process, we use a single set of 28 criteria to evaluate a journal’s quality (24 quality criteria) and influence (4 impact criteria). These are dynamic collections, subject to continuous curation, to ensure journals continue to meet our editorial standards and are in the appropriate collection.
Cover-to-cover indexing
All the journals that we select for inclusion in the Social Sciences Citation Index are indexed cover-to-cover. For each paper, we capture all the authors, all the author affiliations, the abstract and key words (if provided by the author), funding acknowledgements, including agency and grant numbers (if provided), and all the cited references.
True Cited Reference Searching
True cited reference searching lets you find anything that has ever been cited from the 122 million cited reference connections in the Social Sciences Citation Index. Cited reference searching lets you track how any idea, innovation, or creative work has been confirmed, applied, improved, extended, or corrected, and discover anyone who is citing your research worldwide.
Why Web of Science data?
Web of Science Core Collection™ content is uniquely selective and our indexing is uniquely consistent. Our independent and thorough editorial process ensures journal quality, while over fifty years of consistent, accurate, and complete indexing has created an unparalleled data structure. Every article and all cited references from every journal have been indexed, creating the most comprehensive and complete citation network to power both confident discovery and trusted assessment.
Only the Web of Science Core Collection indexes every piece of content cover-to-cover, creating a complete and certain view of over 115 years of the highest quality research.
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Social Sciences in the Web of Science Core Collection