Web of Science Data Access

The databases included in the Web of Science Core Collection comprise one of the most comprehensive citation resources in the world for academic publications, covering the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Because the Web of Science includes an index of citations, it is especially useful as a resource for bibliometric studies.

MSU users have access to the Web of Science platform to search this data, but they may also be interested in building and downloading custom datasets to perform computational or statistical analysis.

Access via TDM Studio

TDM Studio is a dedicated platform for data analysis and visualization, accessible to MSU users via their msu.edu email address. The platform includes "workbench" access for users to interact with datasets via Jupyter Notebooks, as well as an interactive visualization dashboard. Datasets may also be downloaded.

Web of Science API

The Web of Science Starter API is an application programming interface that can be used to query the Web of Science programmatically. For researchers who want to build more sophisticated queries to search and filter publication, citation, and funder data automatically, it offers the ability to automate the gathering of data, but requires some technical skill and coding ability to get up and running.

Use of the API requires a user account and a "registered application" (which needn’t be a software application as such, but rather just a codename to identify the individual data-gathering project).

At the Clarivate developers page, click “Get started”: The 4 steps delineated there should take you through the process of requesting credentials for access to a given API. Under step 3, “Subscribe”, please note that some APIs require manual administrative review so access won't be granted automatically or instantly.

Raw Web of Science XML

If none of the above options work for you, or if you have a project idea that entails working with the entire Web of Science dataset, MSU Libraries can offer you a bulk download in XML. Please be forewarned this data is extremely large (in the range of terabytes) and unwieldy to work with — but please do get in touch with any questions or if you would like to request access.