How to use the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)

This search engine is a lot of fun to use once you get the hang of it. It allows you, first, to identify articles relating to topics you're interested in, and then, using those articles as a kind of base, it allows you to "spread out" and identify related works. You "spread out" by going both up and down. First, once you identify a particular article, you can see quickly which works that article cites in its footnotes. But you can also go the other way and see which articles in the SSCI database cite the particular article you've started out with. You can then do the same thing with the new articles you've identified, again spreading out in both directions. In that way you can generate a "web of citations," and in the course of doing so, you develop a certain feel for that particular area of scholarship. You see which articles and authors are cited a lot, which journals are important, and so on.

How do you use the SSCI? When you first click into the Web of Science, the first thing you should do is choose which database (or databases) you want to search in by checking one or more of them on the bottom of the homepage. Since no one can quite decide whether history is a social science or one of the humanities, if you're searching for a topic that has a certain historical dimension, you should probably check the boxes for "Social Sciences Citation Index" and "Arts and Humanities Citation Index," but leave "Science Citation Index Expanded" unchecked. Then, unless you're searching for a particular article which you've already identified, it's probably best to click the box for "general search."

A search page then appears. You can search, for example, for works by a particular author (in which case you normally give the last name, followed by first initial and an asterisk). Or you can search for a particular topic-"Cuban missile crisis," for example. You can limit those searches in various ways-for example, to articles that have appeared in a certain journal. When you do the search a number of listings appear. You can either click into the particular listings you're interested in, or you could mark the listings that seem worth checking out. To create a list, you then just click the "submit" button on the right. A "Marked List" icon will soon appear on the top right. Clicking into that will enable you to use the list of saved references whenever you like. Note, incidentally, that the listings are often linked directly to your university's holdings, and quite frequently just by clicking a button the full text of the article you're interested in will show up on your computer, to be read, saved, or printed out.

But however you proceed-whether you go into the listings directly or prefer to work from a marked list-you are now ready to click into the listings for particular articles. When you do that, you will see a link for "times cited." By clicking into that link, you will see a list of some of the places where that article has been cited. If, at this point, you want a more inclusive list, you should now do a "cited reference search" by clicking into the icon at the top of the page and then searching for that particular article. Often a lot more references now turn up. Click the boxes for what you are interested in (or click "select all"), then click the "finish search" box. Now a longer list of articles appears, and again you can either go directly into the links for any or those articles or you can mark and save whatever you are interested in.

So that's how you proceed when you want to work your way up-that is, when you want to see where a particular article you're interested in has been cited. But for any of these articles you can also work your way down, by clicking into the "cited references" link for the listing for a particular article. When you do that, a list of all the sources the author has used turns up, and you will note that those sources are of two different kinds. The ones in blue are themselves linked, and when you click "view record" for any of them, you will be taken to the regular listing for that article. You can't do that with the ones in black, but by leaving them checked, you can still see where they have been cited-and you can do this quickly, without having to do a "cited reference search" for every one of them you are interested in. You do this just by checking the "find related records" box. And again a list of linked titles comes up, and you can mark and save what you are interested in.

When you do a topic search, there are various things you can do to increase the number of hits. To see what they are, click into the "more examples" link just above the topic field on the general search page. One of the most useful ones is the "SAME" search operator. This enables you to search for topics containing words not necessarily right next to each other, but which are found in the same listing. For example, if you searched for "relative SAME gains" you'd be able to locate Peter Liberman's article "Trading with the Enemy: Security and Relative Economic Gains," which wouldn't turn up if you just searched for "relative gains"-even if you didn't check "title only."

By using these search operators, along with parentheses and "wildcards" like the asterisk (to catch word variants-i.e., "China" as well as "Chinese"), you can cast a fairly wide net when you do topic searches. For example, suppose you're interested in the Sino-Soviet conflict. You could search directly for "Sino-Soviet conflict" and you'd get 24 hits. But you know that that variant terms (like "dispute") might be used, that some titles might refer to "China" and others to "Chinese," that key terms might be separated from each other, and so on. So knowing all these things, and not wanting to do a whole series of searches with heavily overlapping results, you could construct a single term: (sino-soviet OR ((Soviet OR Russia* OR USSR) SAME Chin*)) SAME (relations OR dispute OR conflict OR schism). This yields 237 hits-or 193 results if you check "title only." Many of them are irrelevant for your purposes, but you can see that right away from the titles. And you will almost certainly have hit upon certain titles that you otherwise would have missed.