Web Services FAQ
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What is Web of Science Web Services?
A Web Service is a program that allows two computer systems to interact over a network. The Web of Science Web Services allows a customer's system to request information from the Web of Science and returns a limited set of data to the requesting system.
How can Web of Science Web Services be used?
The primary reason this service was created is to help institutions extract Web of Science data to populate an institutional repository.
What data fields can be queried through the service?
The requesting system can query the Web of Science using the following fields
- Address (including Street, City, Province, Zip Code, or Country)
- Author
- Conference (including title, location, data, and sponsor)
- Group Author
- Organization or Sub-organization
- Source Publication (journal, book or conference)
- Title
- Topic
- Year Published
The service will support the AND, OR, NOT, and SAME Boolean operators.
What data elements are returned by the service?
The Web of Science Web Service returns five fields to the requesting system:
- Authors — All authors, book authors, and corporate authors
- Article Title
- Source — Includes the source title, subtitle, book series and subtitle, volume, issue, special issue, pages, article number, supplement number, and publication date
- Keywords — all author supplied keywords
- UT — A unique article identified provided by Thomson Reuters
How does a customer become entitled to Web of Science Web Services?
Customers can become entitled to the Web of Science Web Services service by going to http://isiwebofknowledge.com/products_tools/products/related/webservices/ and clicking the link to the Terms and Conditions statement. After agreeing to the T&C, the customer will receive an email with a user ID and password as well as a URL for the documentation. Access to the service is IP controlled, so the Web Services Administrator must be sure to use a computer in the entitled IP range.
Yes, Web of Science Web Services is freely available to every Scientific and Scholarly Research customer that subscribes to Web of Science. The data the customer can extract are limited to the databases and file depths of the subscription.
What type of web service protocol does Web of Science Web Services support?
Web of Science Web Services uses the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). More information on the SOAP protocol can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP_(protocol).
Does the service replace anything we currently offer?
No. For the last several years, there has been a Web Service available for the IS Web of Knowledge. Current users of that system are not required to migrate to this new version.
Is there a limit to the number of users at a site who can be entitled to the service?
Only systems requesting use of the service will be entitled. In most instances, that will be only one IP address, though there may be cases where multiple IP addresses will be entitled.