An Introduction to ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect is a website which provides subscription-based access to a large database of scientific and medical research.

ScienceDirect is an important and essential source of information for millions of specialists around the world.

What is ScienceDirect?

ScienceDirect is a website which provides subscription-based access to a large database of scientific and medical research. It contains the world’s largest electronic collection of full-text and bibliographic information on science, technology and medicine.

ScienceDirect is one of the subsidiaries of Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher. It is operated by the Anglo-Dutch publisher Elsevier. It was launched in March 1997.

It contains more than 15 million scientific articles. Over 900,000 articles on ScienceDirect are open access. Articles published open access are peer-reviewed and made freely available for everyone to read, download and reuse.

Article abstracts are freely available, but access to their full texts (in PDF and, for newer publications, also HTML) generally requires a subscription or pay-per-view purchase.

Although the main focus of Science Direct is on basic, technical and medical sciences, there are also a large number of articles and journals on the humanities and social sciences.

Elsevier’s History

Elsevier’s name came up in 1580, when Louis Elsevier began selling books to students. Elsevier is one of the first publishers to publish scientific journals and books. The Elsevier’s headquarter is in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Elsevier is a leading multimedia publisher. The company publishes medical, scientific and technical products and services around the world. One of these services is the ScienceDirect database.

In the logo of Elsevier, one of the most famous ones in the world, there is an old man picking grapes from a vine. The vine is wrapped around an elm tree. There is a text in the logo, “non solus”, meaning “not alone”. The official history of Elsevier states that this logo shows the relationship between the publisher and the researcher. The elm tree, that symbolizes the publisher, should provide strong support for the vine, which symbolizes the researcher to produce fruit.

This publisher has been expanded greatly in the years since its official launch, including the emergence of world’s great databases, ScienceDirect and Scopus.

ScienceDirect Journal Classification

In general, journals of this database are classified into four main groups:

1. Physical Sciences and Engineering: Chemical Engineering, Computer Sciences, Energy,Metallurgy, Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy
2. Life Sciences: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, Environment, Immunology and Microbiology
3. Health Sciences: Pharmaceutics, Veterinary, Medical and Dental Sciences
4. Social Sciences and Humanities: Arts, Business, Management, Accounting & Economics, Psychology, Social Sciences

ScienceDirect Search

The ScienceDirect database features include search alerts that will be sent to you as soon as an article related to the field you selected is added to the database.

For easier search, ScienceDirect has categorized its scientific content by subject, alphabetically, so that students and researchers can easily search for the first letter of the topic they want to find.

Also the ScienceDirect has made it possible for researchers to search for the resources they need, in addition to the subject search, with the help of some of the categories listed below:

• Keyword search: Researchers can access relevant articles by searching for keywords related to their research topic or interest in the home page.
• Author’s name search: Another feature is the search for content by the author’s name to find all articles written by that author.
• Journal/Book’s name search: Researchers can access it directly by searching for the name of the book or journal they want.