The Institute
for Scientific Information (ISI), an information provider
to the world’s research community, will enable UK higher
education institutions to gain access to its Citation Databases
via the Web
of Science interface.
This week’s announcement, made jointly with the UK’s
Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC) and Combined
Higher Education Software Team (CHEST), means that UK
researchers will have the benefit of a unified search engine
to examine two decades of scholarly journal literature.
“Initially, 120 institutions in the UK will be able to access
the Web of Science with the potential of adding over 600 additional
organisations,” said Tim Hamer, managing director, ISI, UK.
“The Web of Science interface offers features such as novice
and specialist search options, the ability to search on any
author, and searchable abstracts.”
UK researchers will at last enjoy the same benefits that have
been available to scholars in Ireland, Sweden, Denmark,
Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Israel, Brazil,
Australia, the Far East. In the USA, over 60 percent
of all Academic Research Libraries (ARLs) subscribe to
the database.
The new service in the UK will be hosted by MIMAS at
Manchester Computing, University of Manchester in
September 1999. It will replace datasets provided by
BIDS for the past eight years, although the two services will
run concurrently until this time next year.
ISI is headquartered in Philadelphia, Penn.