Systematic Reviews in the Social Sciences

This page covers how we can find most-frequently cited sources and identify background sources related to our topic using the database Web of Science.

Web of Science is the best database at BU for searching citations. It provides highly-valuable journals, texts, and conference proceedings across disciplines. Don't be fooled by the name! It also covers psychology, social work, and other social sciences. Web of Science covers: 

• A multitude of disciplines
• Collects valuable scholarship from 1965 on
• All cited references are indexed and searchable  

Web of Science is a database which allows us to find a multitude of sources in our field and relating to your topic. Don't let the name mislead you! This database also covers social sciences, arts, and humanities. It has a multitude of sources related to us in the field of social work. 

Web of Science is a citation index, which means is collects more than 80 million full records and billions of cited references! 

When doing a literature review, we can find background information or important information related to our topic by asking ourselves this question:

"What are important sources relating to this research topic?"

Let's go through how Web of Science can help us find important or most commonly cited sources:

1. Go to Web of Science: 

2. Type your keywords. Here, we are researching the history of food deserts, or where a population lives more than 1 mile from a grocery store. On Web of Science I am going to type my keyword, "food desert":

 

 

 

3. Then, press search: 

 

 

4. You will then be shown all the results related to your keyword. Click here to follow along with our example! For each result, it will show you the number of citations (in this case: 2) and number of references within the article (in this case: 41).

 

 

5. Right now, our search for research relating to food desert is showing in order of relevance:

 

Once we have our list of results, we can change our ranking order. To do this:

6.  Click on the Sort by: Relevance button on your results. This will give you a list of different ways to sort your results. Options include relevance, recently added, date (newest or oldest), citations (highest or lowest), usage, and more! For example:

 

7. To see the articles with the highest number of citations relevant to your keywords. Click on: "Sort by: Citations: highest first." 

 

8. Then, evaluate your results! For our keywords concerning "food desert" our result shows an article that has been cited 1,058 times by other articles and has been cited more than any other paper relating to these keywords in this database. This shows that is an impactful article related to our topic.

 

When we search on Web of Science and sort our results, we also have the option to "Sort by: Citation class." This lets us select if we want background, basis, support, or differ sources. These are defined as:

Background: Previously published research that represents the study within a scholarly area.

Basis: References that report the data sets, methods, concepts, and ideas the author is using for her work directly on or which the author bases their

Support: References which the current study reports to have similar results to. This may also refere to similarities in methodology or replication of findings or results.

Differ: References which the study reports to have different results to. This may also refer to differences in approach, methodology, or differences in sample sizes.

 

To pull out the results related to a specific type of article click the "Sort by:" button and then select "Citation class: Background: Highest first." This will give us the sources which are often used as background information when people talk about these keywords and this topic. 

 

For searching "food desert" and "Citation class: Background: Highest first." we then get a list of the most cited results for background research. You can connect to this link to see these results. For example:

 

These may then be the articles we choose to highlight in our literature review since they have impacted the conversation around this topic in some way and provide foundational information.

You can refine your search with some filters available through Web of Science. Here, our research question is thinking about psychadelic therapy:

You can follow along with this search by clicking here.

1. After searching your keywords on Web of Science, you can look on the left-hand side and select by different filters. This includes "Highly Cited Papers" which are papers that are cited a lot. There is also"Hot Papers" which means that is it is a paper that recently-published articles keep citing. 

 

Here is a visual representation where we can see more clearly: