Retrieval of very large numbers of items in the Web of Science: an exercise to develop accurate search strategies

"The current communication presents a simple exercise with the aim of solving a singular problem: the retrieval of extremely large amounts of items in the Web of Science interface. As it is known, Web of Science interface allows a user to obtain at most 100,000 items from a single query. But what about queries that achieve a result of more than 100,000 items? The exercise developed one possible way to achieve this objective. The case study is the retrieval of the entire scientific production from the United States in a specific year. Different sections of items were retrieved using the field Source of the database. Then, a simple Boolean statement was created with the aim of eliminating overlapping and to improve the accuracy of the search strategy. The importance of team work in the development of advanced search strategies was noted."

(source: Ricardo Arencibia-Jorge, Loet Leydesdorff, Zaida Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Ronald Rousseau and Soren W. Paris, Retrieval of very large numbers of items in the Web of Science: an exercise to develop accurate search strategies. El Profesional de la Información 2009;18(5):529-533 / pre-print)