ISI WEB OF KNOWLEDGE ANALYZE TOOL ALLOWS USERS TO SPOT TRENDS, TRACE THE HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
Philadelphia, PA, USA - January 20, 2006 — Countless researchers agree—evaluating research trends is crucial to the advancement of science. When launched in December 2001, ISI Web of KnowledgeSM ushered in a new era of research. Since then, it has set the standard in providing researchers with a single environment from which to seamlessly navigate to the highest quality journal and Web content, evaluation tools, and bibliographic management products. With the recent addition of the powerful new feature—the Analyze Tool—ISI Web of Knowledge became the first information resource that allows users to analyze the number of papers dedicated to a specific topic, allowing them to easily spot developing and past trends.
“The Analyze Tool lets ISI Web of Knowledge users track the evolution of research,” said Peggy Dominy, Information Service Librarian for Science at Drexel University, Philadelphia. “Before the Analyze Tool, identifying seminal scientific papers and tracking the evolution of research were cumbersome processes. The Analyze Tool makes it easy and, therefore, gives us a better picture of how to proceed with our research.”
The Analyze Tool boasts two advancements. First, it refines a search by organizing the results, creating subsets of identified items of interest. Second, it mines search summaries for valuable information, easily identifying hidden trends and patterns within particular areas of research, and displaying the results in an easy-to-read graphic format.
Dominy is particularly impressed with the Analyze Tool’s capabilities and ease-of-use.
“I love being able to do so much with the Analyze Tool,” said Dominy. “I regularly conduct library tutorials for Drexel students, and the Analyze Tool has become a key component of these tutorials. The students love it—they see the rankings and not just the raw numbers.”
A History of Innovation
The Analyze Tool is just one milestone in a long history of innovations—in fact, revolutionizing research comes naturally to Thomson Scientific who’ve been doing it since 1955 when Dr. Eugene Garfield, now chairman emeritus of Thomson Scientific, penned “Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas.”
Ever since Dr. Garfield first envisioned, and outlined in his paper, the tools that allow researchers to expedite their research process, Thomson Scientific has dedicated themselves to bringing these innovative solutions to libraries and—now more than ever— to the desktops of its users. Researchers at thousands of institutions worldwide use Thomson products to evaluate the impact of their work; spot scientific trends; and, as in Dominy’s case, trace the history of and identify milestones in modern scientific thought.
A New Type of Analysis
The Analyze Tool also helps Dominy advance a broader objective (and one shared by Dr. Garfield)—to link together relevant, associated ideas from different areas of science.
“Literature analysis is one way that we track the evolution of research. By tracking the journals in which long-standing research topics were once published, and where they are published now, we can truly tell how the scientific fields have changed,” said Dominy.
Dominy and Drexel University chemist Allan L. Smith used the Analyze Tool feature to track the similarities between two areas of science, calorimetry and thermal analysis—two fields that, according to Dominy “have evolved and overlapped over the past 15 years.” Dominy and Smith analyzed 30 years worth of key specialized publications to see where articles about each field were being published. The results showed that these two fields, in some respects, have united in recent years; key papers in each area are frequently published now in the same specialized journals.
Dominy and Smith presented their findings at the 2005 Calorimetry Conference and 2005 North American Thermal Analysis Society Conference to noteworthy praise.
“Attendees were excited to learn about this type of analysis concerning these topics,” she said. “This was an aspect of the literature that this group of researchers had not considered before—in fact, many weren’t aware that this type of analysis could even be done.”
In addition to the Web of Science, the Analyze Tool also is embedded in new versions of INSPEC®, PsycINFO®, BIOSIS Preview®, CAB Abstracts®, Food Science and Technology Abstracts®, ISI ProceedingsSM, Biological Abstracts®, Zoological Records™, and the recently launched MEDLINE®—all resident within the ISI Web of Knowledge.
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