Learn how the Web of Science partners with the research community to sustain integrity.
Integrity is the bedrock of research as every contribution is strengthened by what’s come before. When cracks form – through fraud, misconduct, honest mistakes or ethical lapses – doubt is cast on the scholarly record, diminishing the certainty required to best serve society through policy, innovation and further research.
At Clarivate, we are committed to fostering trust in research. We believe that safeguarding the scholarly record is a shared mission involving everyone engaged in funding, creating, publishing and assessing research. In October 2020, our Institute for Scientific Information published a report encouraging the community to adopt a broad view of what it means to conduct research with integrity and to consider how certain research evaluation instruments and incentive mechanisms are leading to a rise in deviant publication behavior. Four years later, it is clear how much is at stake.
In an era where the scholarly record faces increasing integrity risks, the need for high-quality data derived from rigorously selected sources has never been greater. For over 50 years, we’ve kept research integrity core to our mission, and it continues to drive our priorities as we collaborate with the community to define and implement best practices.
A legacy of integrity
The Web of Science Core Collection is guided by the legacy of Dr. Eugene Garfield, inventor of the world’s first citation index. We remain true to his principles of objectivity, selectivity and collection dynamics, while adapting and responding to technological advances and changes in the publishing landscape.
Our publicly available selection and evaluation criteria are grounded in community standards for editorial rigor and best practices, ensuring transparency and accountability. These criteria reflect many decades of publishing experience within our in-house editorial team and our deep connections with the academic community. This includes the close relationships we maintain through proactive engagement with journal editors, publishers, and participation on industry panels, committees and working groups such as United2Act.
Our editorial and content operations teams interact daily with editors and publishers to discuss and understand the nuances of the many and varied publications submitted to us for evaluation and indexing, ensuring our assessments are made based on rigorous review, a deep understanding of the publications under evaluation, and consistent and unbiased application of our criteria. This consistency does not translate to a one-size-fits-all approach.
The Web of Science Core Collection supports diverse publication models, including journals that publish a traditional issue-based schedule as well as those that publish early access or operate a continuous article publication schedule. We index journals that have adopted open models of peer review and emerging models such as “publish, review, curate”. Our policy concerning journals and platforms that decouple publication from peer review recognizes both traditional and emerging models as the landscape of scholarly communication evolves, enabling consistent application of our transparent selection criteria, while reducing the risk of exploitation by untrustworthy actors.
A safeguard against emerging threats
As we continue to support emerging publishing models, we must also balance our decisions to address new threats to research integrity. Fraud or gaming tactics designed to pollute the scholarly record are ever evolving. We continue to respond by investing in innovative in-house tools and partnering with providers of novel solutions such as the award-winning Clear Skies Papermill Alarm. As a result, the research community can continue to depend on the Web of Science Core Collection as a trusted source of scholarly information.
Trust markers in the Web of Science
In addition to enabling researchers to locate trusted journal content resulting from many publishing models in the Core Collection, the Web of Science platform also makes a diverse range of output types discoverable, with links to proxies of quality. For example, the Preprint Citation Index responsibly integrates preprints into researcher workflows by helping users to evaluate the trustworthiness of unreviewed preprints in context. By linking a preprint to an author’s profile, peer review history and published versions, the version of record can be easily located, when available, and provide relevant information to help assess reliability.
Peer review is a cornerstone of research integrity, requiring a significant investment of time and energy to ensure the quality of published research. Clarivate has pioneered technologies that make peer review more visible to the community. Publisher-verified peer review activities are prominently displayed on Web of Science Researcher Profiles, helping researchers to showcase their valuable contributions to peers and evaluators. For journals that have adopted open or transparent peer review models, Web of Science Core Collection records link out to reviewer feedback, providing full transparency for the peer review process.
Core Collection records also include additional trust markers, such as links to associated data sets in repositories, data availability statements and complete funding acknowledgment statements. These links help other researchers verify results and replicate studies, to ensure that findings are accurate and reliable. We served on the working group to develop the NISO Recommended Practice to responsibly communicate retracted research to the community, and apply these principles within our products. To help Core Collection users identify potential articles of concern, we index retractions using data obtained directly from publishers and Retraction Watch, and clearly mark retracted articles.
Looking to the future
Clarivate remains a steadfast partner in the research community, balancing adaptability to new standards and publishing models with a firm commitment to our principles of quality and integrity. We are constantly collaborating with publishers, researchers and institutions. To give one example, we’ve recently launched the Web of Science Community Forum, a platform for researchers and librarians to partner with us in community-driven product development, ensuring that innovation and integrity go hand in hand. Institutional partners are also guiding the development of our AI-native Web of Science Research Intelligence platform, which will support academic leaders in upholding the highest integrity standards for research conducted at their institution and assessing research activities and outputs beyond traditional bibliometrics.
We look forward to our continued collaboration with the community to foster a scholarly ecosystem that is transparent, trustworthy, and forward-thinking.
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