The latest version of the Web of Science has some new features that should make it easier for users to find relevant articles. For example:
- All terms are now searched in the Topic field – there are no ‘stop’ words (the older version had a list of ‘stop’ words which were ignored by the search engine).
- The new ‘lemmatization’ feature will automatically search for all variations of a word, such as plurals and verb tenses eg if you type in ‘run’, it will also search for ‘runs’, ‘running’ and ‘ran’.
- Both British and US spelling variations are automatically included in your search eg typing in ‘behaviour’ will also pick up references with the US spelling ‘behavior’.
- The truncation feature has been extended to include left-hand truncation. This means that typing ‘*saccharide’ will search for any words which have letters before the word stem eg ‘monosaccharide’, ‘polysaccharide’ etc.
- Another useful new feature is the NEAR/x operator. This will allow you to search for articles where two terms appear within a set number of words eg ‘climate NEAR/4 desertification’.
If you have any questions or comments about the new version, please contact your Subject Librarian.