Web of Science Search Strategy: TS=, AU=, Boolean

To search Web of Science effectively, use Advanced Search with field tags (TS=, AU=, SO=), Boolean and proximity operators, and Cited Reference Search rather than typing a plain-text query into Basic Search, which returns thousands of loosely related records. Author-disambiguation tools like ResearcherID and ORCID keep an author search from missing or merging the wrong person.

For what Web of Science itself is — its indexes, ownership history, and how it differs from Scopus and OpenAlex — see CASRAI’s Web of Science dictionary entry and the Scopus vs Web of Science vs OpenAlex comparison. This page assumes you already know what the platform is and focuses only on searching it well.

Basic Search vs. Advanced Search

Basic Search is Web of Science’s default entry point: a single search box (defaulting to a Topic search across title, abstract, author keywords, and Keywords Plus) with a small number of drop-down fields — Author, Title, Publication Name, Year — that can be chained together with AND/OR using “+ Add row.” It is fast for a quick lookup (“find this paper,” “what has this author published recently”) but its field options are limited to what the interface exposes, and complex logic (nested Boolean groups, proximity operators, exclusions with NOT) is awkward or unavailable.

Advanced Search uses a single free-text query box in which you type field tags and operators directly, e.g. TS=("data management plan*") AND AU=(Smith J). It is the only interface that supports:

The full set of field tags (not just the handful exposed as Basic Search dropdowns)
The NOT operator
Nested parenthetical logic combining multiple fields and operators in one query
Proximity operators (NEAR/x, SAME)
Saved, re-runnable, and exportable search strings — useful for documenting a systematic-review search strategy or re-running a saved alert

For anything beyond a one-off lookup — a literature review, a systematic search, a recurring current-awareness search, or a search you need to defend or reproduce later — build it in Advanced Search rather than the Basic Search dropdowns.

Field Tags: Searching a Specific Part of the Record

A field tag tells Advanced Search which part of the record to search, instead of matching your terms anywhere in a record. Tags are written as a two-letter code followed by an equals sign and the search term in parentheses. The tags most relevant to a practical literature search:

TS= (Topic) — searches title, abstract, author keywords, and Keywords Plus together in one field. This is the closest Advanced Search equivalent to Basic Search’s default box, and the field most searches should start from.
TI= (Title) — searches only the article title. Narrower than TS=; useful when a topic search returns too much noise from abstract-only mentions.
AB= (Abstract) — searches only the abstract field.
AU= (Author) — searches the author name field. Because author names are ambiguous (see the disambiguation section below), Web of Science also supports author-identifier fields for a more precise version of the same search.
AI= (Author Identifiers) — searches by a Web of Science ResearcherID or a linked ORCID iD rather than a typed name, which sidesteps name-variant and common-name ambiguity entirely.
SO= (Publication Name / Source) — restricts results to a specific journal or source title, e.g. SO=(Nature).
PY= (Year Published) — restricts by publication year or year range.
SU= (Research Area) / WC= (Web of Science Category) — restricts by the subject classification Web of Science assigns to a journal.
DO= (DOI) — looks up a specific record directly by its DOI, useful for confirming a record exists in Web of Science’s coverage rather than a keyword search.
AK= / KP= (Author Keywords / Keywords Plus) — search the two keyword fields individually rather than as part of a combined Topic search, when you specifically want author-supplied keywords versus the algorithmically-derived Keywords Plus terms.

Multiple field-tagged clauses combine with Boolean operators into one query, e.g.:

TS=("research data management" OR "data management plan") AND PY=(2022-2026) AND WC=("Information Science & Library Science")

Boolean and Proximity Operators

Boolean operators must be typed in upper case:

AND — both terms must appear (narrows results). Example: TS=(ORCID AND "author disambiguation").
OR — either term may appear (broadens results); use to combine synonyms and spelling variants. Example: TS=("data repository" OR "data archive" OR "data warehouse").
NOT — excludes records containing the second term. NOT is only available in Advanced Search, not Basic Search, and should be used cautiously — it can exclude relevant records that happen to mention the excluded term in passing.

Parentheses group clauses and control the order of evaluation, the same as in any Boolean query — always group an OR list in parentheses before combining it with AND, or the query will not evaluate the way you expect.

Two proximity operators go beyond simple Boolean matching:

NEAR/x — finds terms within x words of each other in either order. Used without a number, NEAR defaults to a 15-word span. Example: TS=(researcher NEAR/5 identifier) finds records where “researcher” and “identifier” occur within 5 words of each other, in either order — tighter than AND (which ignores word distance entirely) and more flexible than a fixed phrase.
SAME — restricts matches to terms appearing within the same sub-unit of a structured field; in practice this is used specifically in Address searches, to require two terms (e.g., an institution and a department) to occur within the same address block of a record rather than merely both appearing somewhere in it.

Wildcards and truncation work inside a field-tagged term, the same as most bibliographic databases:

* (asterisk) — replaces zero or more characters, e.g. biolog* matches biology, biological, biologist.
? (question mark) — replaces exactly one character, e.g. disrupt?r matches disrupter or disruptor.
$ (dollar sign) — replaces zero or one character, e.g. odo$r matches odor or odour.

Quotation marks force exact-phrase matching ("data management plan" as one phrase rather than three independently-matched words) — use this whenever a multi-word technical term should not be split apart by the search engine.

Cited Reference Search: Tracing a Paper’s Citation History

Cited Reference Search is a distinct search mode from Basic and Advanced Search — it searches the reference lists inside indexed articles rather than searching articles’ own titles, abstracts, or keywords. It answers a different question: not “which papers are about this topic,” but “which papers have cited this specific work.”

The practical workflow:

Open Cited Reference Search and enter the cited author’s name and, ideally, the cited work’s title or an approximate publication year — Cited Reference Search fields typically include cited author, cited work/title, cited year, and cited source, since older or less-standardized reference lists don’t always cite consistently.
Web of Science returns a list of distinct “cited reference variants” it has matched — the same original paper can appear as several slightly different reference-list entries (a truncated title, a journal-abbreviation variant, a page-number discrepancy) because Web of Science indexes references exactly as they were printed in the citing article’s bibliography, not normalized against a master record.
Select the correct variant(s) — checking multiple variants that plausibly refer to the same source is often necessary to avoid undercounting — and run the search to retrieve every indexed article that cites that work.
The resulting citing-article list is itself a normal result set: it can be further filtered, exported, or combined with additional search criteria.

This is the mechanism behind forward citation tracking — starting from a known paper and finding everything that has cited it since, which is the core operation behind a citation-based literature review, a case for a paper’s ongoing influence in a tenure dossier, or confirming whether a retracted or corrected paper is still being cited without acknowledgment of the retraction. It is functionally the inverse of a reference list: a reference list shows what a paper cited going backward in time; Cited Reference Search shows what has cited a paper going forward in time.

Author Disambiguation: ResearcherID and ORCID

A plain AU= name search is inherently ambiguous: common names collide across many different real people, and the same person’s name may appear in a citing record under several variant forms (initials only, a former surname, a transliterated spelling). Two identifier layers exist specifically to make an author search precise instead of approximate:

Web of Science ResearcherID is Clarivate’s own author-profile identifier, introduced in 2008 (originally under Thomson Reuters), that lets a researcher claim their publication record within the Web of Science ecosystem. It is Clarivate-specific — useful for disambiguating and managing a profile inside Web of Science itself, but not portable to other publishers or systems the way an open identifier is.
ORCID iD is the non-proprietary, publisher-and-funder-agnostic persistent identifier for individual researchers (see CASRAI’s ORCID iD entry and its companion guide, How to Register, Find, and Search for ORCID iDs). Web of Science profiles can be linked to a researcher’s ORCID record, and Clarivate’s data ecosystem exchanges metadata with the ORCID registry so that publications claimed or verified on one side can inform the other.

Practically, this means: rather than (or in addition to) a name-based AU=(Smith J) search — which, for a common surname, can silently mix together dozens of unrelated researchers, or just as easily miss records where the name was entered as a variant — search or filter by the AI= (Author Identifiers) field using a known ResearcherID or ORCID iD, where one has been claimed and linked. Web of Science also applies its own machine-learning-assisted name-disambiguation to group probable-same-author records automatically where no external identifier is present, combined with human curation — but this is a best-effort algorithmic grouping, not a guarantee, and should not be treated as equivalent to a verified identifier match. For any use case where precision matters — a tenure dossier, a funder-mandated publication list, a systematic bibliometric analysis — search by identifier wherever one exists, and treat name-only author search results as a starting point to verify, not a final list.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between TS= and TI= in Web of Science?

TS= (Topic) searches the title, abstract, author keywords, and Keywords Plus together in one combined field. TI= (Title) searches only the article title. TS= casts a wider net and is the usual starting point; TI= is useful when a topic search returns too much noise and you want to require the term to appear specifically in the title.

How do I search Web of Science by a specific journal?

Use the SO= (Source/Publication Name) field tag in Advanced Search, e.g. SO=(Nature), optionally combined with other field tags using AND.

Can I exclude a term from a Web of Science search?

Yes, using the NOT Boolean operator in Advanced Search — NOT is not available in Basic Search. Use it cautiously, since excluding a term can also exclude relevant records that mention it only in passing.

What does NEAR/x mean in Web of Science?

NEAR/x is a proximity operator that finds two terms within x words of each other, in either order, inside the same field. Used without a number, NEAR defaults to a 15-word span. It sits between AND (which ignores word distance) and an exact phrase search (which requires an exact fixed order).

How is Cited Reference Search different from a normal topic search?

A topic search (TS=) searches the content of indexed articles themselves — their titles, abstracts, and keywords. Cited Reference Search searches the reference lists inside those indexed articles, letting you find every article that has cited a specific earlier work — forward citation tracking, rather than a keyword match.

Should I search by author name or by ResearcherID/ORCID?

By identifier whenever one is available and linked. A name-only AU= search is vulnerable to common-name collisions and name-variant misses; searching or filtering by AI= (Author Identifiers) using a ResearcherID or ORCID iD returns a precise match to that specific person’s claimed or verified record instead of an algorithmic best guess.

Related CASRAI Resources

Web of Science — what the platform is, its indexes, and its ownership history
Science Citation Index (SCI/SCIE) — the citation index at the core of the Web of Science Core Collection
Scopus vs Web of Science vs OpenAlex — a structured comparison of the three major discovery platforms
ORCID iD and How to Register, Find, and Search for ORCID iDs — the open identifier layer Web of Science profiles can link to
How to Look Up a Journal’s Impact Factor — the bibliometric indicator most closely associated with Web of Science’s Journal Citation Reports
Persistent Identifiers & Research Information Systems — the CASRAI cluster hub for this topic

Sources

Clarivate, Web of Science Core Collection Advanced Search Field Tags documentation (webofscience.help.clarivate.com / webofscience.zendesk.com support articles).
University of Dayton Libraries, “Web of Science” research guide — Boolean operator case-sensitivity and NOT-in-Advanced-Search-only confirmation.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library, “Advanced Search – Web of Science” guide — Boolean, proximity (NEAR/x, SAME), and wildcard/truncation operator syntax.
University of Tasmania Library, “Search Fields” guide (Systematic Reviews) — TS= field definition.
Clarivate, “Author data, made better together” (Web of Science ResearcherID / ORCID integration).