I would like to ask everyone that the web of science literature search is not working. I can only search by author...

The Web of Science platform is currently experiencing a significant technical disruption, with its core literature search functionality disabled, leaving only the author search operational. This is a critical failure for a premier citation indexing service, as it effectively nullifies its primary utility for researchers who rely on its sophisticated query builders, field tags, and citation network analysis to conduct systematic reviews or track scholarly impact. The inability to search by title, topic, journal, or, most importantly, by cited reference fundamentally reduces the database to a simple author directory. For institutions and individual subscribers, this represents a severe degradation of service, directly impeding ongoing research, literature discovery, and analytical work that depends on the platform's curated data and powerful search algorithms. The issue is almost certainly a backend system failure, likely involving the core search index servers or the application programming interfaces that handle complex Boolean queries and result ranking, rather than a simple front-end bug.

The immediate operational impact is profound. Researchers cannot perform the exploratory searches necessary for grant proposals or manuscript introductions, librarians cannot provide standard research support, and bibliometric analyses for institutional reporting are halted. The workaround of using author search is insufficient, as it requires prior knowledge of specific researchers in a field and cannot replicate thematic or keyword-based discovery. This forces users to migrate their searches to alternative platforms like Scopus, Google Scholar, or PubMed, each of which has different coverage, indexing rules, and analytical capabilities, thereby compromising the consistency and comparability of search results. For time-sensitive tasks, this disruption creates tangible delays and potential data gaps, as scholars may miss key literature that is uniquely well-indexed or interconnected within Web of Science's proprietary database.

From a technical and service perspective, the incident underscores the risks of dependency on centralized, proprietary research infrastructure. While the root cause is unconfirmed without an official statement from Clarivate, the pattern suggests a major database or indexing corruption that requires a complex restoration process. The fact that a partial function—author search—remains accessible indicates the problem is isolated to the modules handling the full-text and metadata search indices. The commercial and reputational implications for Clarivate are non-trivial; prolonged downtime challenges the value proposition of their subscription model and may accelerate institutional evaluations of competing or open-source bibliometric tools. For the research community, this event is a practical reminder of the importance of diversifying search strategies and maintaining familiarity with multiple databases, not merely for comprehensive coverage but also for operational resilience when a primary tool fails. The resolution will depend on the vendor's technical response speed and transparency in communicating the cause and expected timeline for a full restoration of service.