ScienceDirect is a website which provides access to a large
bibliographic database of
scientific
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...
and
medical publications of the Dutch publisher
Elsevier
Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', '' Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...
. It hosts over 18 million pieces of content from more than 4,000
academic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...
s and 30,000
e-books of this publisher. The access to the full-text requires subscription, while the bibliographic
metadata is free to read. ScienceDirect is operated by Elsevier. It was launched in March 1997.
Usage
The journals are grouped into four main sections: ''
Physical Sciences and
Engineering
Engineering is the use of scientific method, scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad rang ...
'', ''
Life Sciences'', ''
Health Sciences
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to health sciences:
Health sciences are those sciences which focus on health, or health care, as core parts of their subject matter. Health sciences relate to multiple ac ...
'', and ''
Social Sciences
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of society, societies and the Social relation, relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the o ...
and
Humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at th ...
''.
Article abstracts are freely available, and access to their full texts (in
PDF and, for newer publications, also
HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
) generally requires a subscription or
pay-per-view
Pay-per-view (PPV) is a type of pay television or webcast service that enables a viewer to pay to watch individual events via private telecast.
Events can be purchased through a multichannel television platform using their electronic program g ...
purchase unless the content is freely available in open access.
Subscriptions to the overall offering hosted on ScienceDirect, rather than to specific titles it carries, are usually acquired through a so called
big deal. The other
big five have similar offers.
ScienceDirect also competes for audience with other large
aggregators and hosts of
scholarly communication content such as academic social network
ResearchGate and
open access repository arXiv, as well as with fully
open access publishing venues and
mega journals like
PLOS.
ScienceDirect also carries ''
Cell'', a journal which studies of methodological quality and reliability have found to "publish significantly substandard structures", amid an overall finding that "reliability of published research works in several fields may be decreasing with increasing journal rank".
See also
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List of academic databases and search engines
This article contains a representative list of notable databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific an ...
*
Scopus
References
Further reading
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External links
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{{Reed Elsevier
Academic journal online publishing platforms
Commercial digital libraries
Digital libraries
Elsevier
Full-text scholarly online databases