Accessing Web of Science

The University of Michigan Library subscribes to the Web of Science database, which has a sub-database strictly for dataset searching. Web of Science is linked from the library homepage under Popular Databases:

Landing page of the U-M Library depicting library search result boxes; arrow points to "Go to database" link

This direct link to Web of Science will also work. If you are off-campus you will need to sign in with your U-M credentials.

Accessing Data Citation Index

Choose Data Citation Index from the Web of Science landing page using the dropdown menu.

web of science homepage with data citation index in the dropdown menu

Use Data Citation Index to:

- Discover research datasets and data studies from a wide range of international data repositories in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities.
- Discover research data connected to articles published in journals, books, and conference proceedings.
- Link directly to data repositories for easy access to the deposited data sets.

Inside Data Citation Index

We're going to run a simple search for autonomous vehicles and look for the types of data involved. A search for "autonomous vehicles" OR EV OR "electronic vehicles" yielded almost 23,000 results.

The Refine results column on the left-hand side of the screen allows you to narrow down types of data using Content Type and Data Types.

Selecting See all> in the Data Types filter option will open up an expanded menu showing all the possible Data Types associated with the search.

closeup screenshot of data filters

Then the Exclude and Refine buttons can be used to narrow down a search, depending on your research needs.

list of many datatypes

Click NEXT to learn how to search in ICPSR.