Instruction session on Web of Knowledge for Sociology 290: Methods in Social Research.

1. SOC 290: Sweet Library Resources
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2. Who am I and why should you care?
• Dawn Stahura
• I’m your Sociology Librarian/Liaison/Superhero
Today’s Class:
• Peer-reviewed, scholarly articles overview
• Literature Review and Web of Knowledge
• Hands on activity
• Libguide and online encyclopedias

3. What’s the Difference?
• What is this “peer-reviewed” business?
• You may need scholarly articles for your assignment.
• Not all journals are scholarly. But how do you tell what’s what?

4. The Literature Review
• You have a topic in mind so you do a search.
• You find some articles and draw on these past articles so you can quote
them in your paper to support your points.
• Classic papers.
• A place to start would be to see who has CITED that work recently and in
what context. You want to trace the evolution of those ideas FORWARD in
time!
• So how can you do this when there is SO MUCH STUFF OUT THERE?

5. Some very brief history
This concept of indexing and abstracting of not just article citations but the
references associated with those articles was the brainchild of Dr. Eugene
Garfield.
Before the Internet, these were very heavy print books known as the Science
Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities
Citation Index.
Think very big books and tinny, tiny, little print.
Now all three are joined together into a database known as the Web of
Knowledge!
And our eyes are saved.

6. Here comes the POWER…..
You have the capacity to take a classic article and uncover who the author was
influenced by (who was cited to write the paper) and go forward in time to discover
how that seminal research affected newer works (who is citing it).
In Web of Knowledge, the cited references are associated with THEIR articles, but
each reference is also a record in the database which can be searched as well.
Web of Knowledge only indexes articles BUT the references associated with a source
article can be drawn from any type of material, so cited reference records can be
articles but also books, reports, unpublished papers, or whatever else the author has
cited in the article.
You can search Web of Knowledge by topic, on a particular author, or track down a
specific article. Once you find your article, you can immediately see its bibliography
and start tracking the ideas in a current article BACK in time as well as FORWARD in
time.
Great Scott~!

7. Here’s some examples….
As a researcher, you can see who is citing your work and in what context. Also
good if you find yourself in a tenure track position one day.
Address fields: lets you see where an author is from. This is useful if you want to
see what your peers are publishing and where. Also what journals they are
publishing in.
Our first search: female college students (topic) and entitlement (topic)
Author search: Ritzer, G (highest to lowest ranking)
**notice that you do NOT spell out the first name. Use initials.
Cited reference search: George Ritzer’s book, The McDonalization of Society.
**this database is BIG on abbreviations.
***work search

8. Author finder: John Stahura
Analyze feature: Let’s see what this does!
**This feature is good if you are tracking publication patterns, or doing a general
search of scholarship (who is doing it? Where, that is, what country? Which
organizations? What journals are they publishing in? What subject categories does
this particular department publish in?)
Address search: Know a department? Remember those dreaded abbreviations!
Wellesley Coll, Dept Sociol, Wellesley, MA 02481

9. Some words of advice!
• To do a thorough job on your literature review, you will need to do it several
times throughout the writing/research process.
• This will help you frame and reframe your research question.
• At the end of the research process, take another quick look at Web of
Knowledge just to make sure you did not miss any stragglers. Here is where
the citation alerts can come in handy!!!

10. And just for you…
http://libguides.wellesley.edu/soc290
Trouble finding information on your topic?
Think about your topic and where it fits in the hierarchy. What higher class does
your topic belong to? Are their subclasses of your topic that could become
factors to consider? Encyclopedias can help with this! So can concept mapping!
Gov’t policy Housing issues
sociology
Social work
homelessness
Sociology of cities
Education of
homeless children

11. Questions? Help?
• I’m available for one-on-one consultations.
• You can email me to set up an appointment or stop by
during one of my scheduled desk shifts at Clapp.
• All my contact information is on the libguide.
• And of course, Happy Valentines Day!