Authors / Researchers: Find collaborators

Which authors are frequently writing papers in your field?

To find out who the established authors are in your field, you can search the Web of Science Core Collection for your topic of interest and use the Analyze Results tool.

You'll find the Analyze Results tool when you're looking at any result set in Web of Science, including the Marked List.

When you run Analyze Results, you can choose to show the top 10, 25, 50, etc. authors for your result set.

This will provide you with insight into who are the most prolific authors writing on your topic.

To view an author's papers, including their institutional affiliation, mark the box for the author name and click the Refine Results by Selected button.

To identify an author's institutional affiliation, open the full record for any paper published after 2007* and go to the Author Information section of the record.

* All authors and their affiliations are captured for every publication in Web of Science Core Collection. Starting in 2008, each author is also linked to his/her affiliation(s).

Who are the authors of Hot and Highly Cited papers on your topic?

If your institution subscribes to Essential Science Indicators, you can view the Highly Cited and/or Hot Papers in any result set in the Web of Science Core Collection.

Highly Cited Papers are papers published in the last 10 years that are receiving the most citations (top 1%) when compared to peer papers (same field, same publication year).

Hot Papers are papers published in the last two years that are receiving the most citations (top 0.1%) in the most recent two-month period when compared to peer papers (same field, same publication date).

Search the Web of Science Core Collection for your topic and use the Hot and Highly Cited quick filter options in the refine panel on the left. 

For a large set of Highly Cited and/or Hot Papers, you can use the Analyze Results tool described earlier to see which authors are the most prolific within this group of papers, or, for a smaller set of papers, you can open up each individual record to see the authors and their affiliations.

Which authors have cited you?

The authors who cite your work could be your partners in future collaborations.

Go to the citing articles of a single paper

From the full record view of any paper you've authored in the Web of Science, you can click on the Times Cited count to view the citing articles. If there are a lot of citing articles, you might want to use the Analyze Results tool described earlier to see if any authors have cited you in more than one paper.

Go to the citing articles of a group of papers

For a group of papers that you've authored, you can view the citing articles for the whole group by using the Citation Report feature.

Steps

1. Search Web of Science by your name, Web of Science ResearcherID or ORCID unique identifier.  Refine results as needed to obtain your specific publications.

2. You'll find the Citation Report tool available for any result set of 10,000 or fewer records.

3. Run Citation Report on all of your publications. This report will show you the total number of citing articles for all of your publications: you'll see a Citing Articles count and a Citing Articles without self-citations count, which is the number of citing articles minus any articles that are appearing in the set of publications you are examining (in other words, for the scenario described here, this count would show you only citing articles that you have not authored).

4. Click on the citing article count to go to the citing articles. From the Citing Articles page, you can use the Analyze Results tool to see the subject categories of the citing articles, who is citing you, etc.

Who are the authors in your field with the most overall citation impact?

Until now we've found collaborators by identifying the most prolific authors in your field, the authors of the most cited papers in your field, and the authors of papers that cite your work.

For a more nuanced view of an author's citation impact within your field, you can use InCites Benchmarking & Analytics.

Note: InCites Benchmarking & Analytics requires a sign-in. If you have already set up a Web of Science sign-in as described on the First Steps page of this guide, then you can use the same credentials to sign into InCites. Otherwise, use the Register an email address option below the Sign in button when you are in InCites.

Steps

1. We begin in Web of Science Core Collection. Do a search for your topic of interest. If your search results are 50,000 records or fewer, you can export those publications to InCites for an author analysis. (Note: if you have more than 50,000 records try the options in the Refine panel, or modify your search, to whittle your results to under 50,000).

2. Use the Save to InCites option. You will be prompted to sign into InCites and give your custom dataset a name.

3. In InCites go to the Researchers entity from the Analyze menu.

4. Make sure to change your dataset from the InCites dataset to the custom dataset you just created from Web of Science Core Collection.

5. Set a minimum Web of Science document threshold so that you're not looking at authors who have written just a few papers on your topic.

6. Sort the table by Web of Science Documents to get a sense of who are the most prolific authors in your topic. Use Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) to get a sense of each author's impact within your topic. CNCI is an indicator of impact normalized for subject focus, age, and document type. A CNCI value of one represents performance at par with world average, values above one are considered above average, and values below one are considered below average. A CNCI value of two is considered twice the world average.

7. Click on the Web of Science Document count for an author to view the list of documents by that author. The document list also provides article level metrics. Click on the title of any document in the list to go to the full record page for that item in Web of Science Core Collection.

Custom Datasets

Watch the video on saving custom datasets from Web of Science Core Collection to InCites.