ScienceDirect is a website which provides access to a large bibliographic database of scientific 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 Physical science is a branch of natural science that studies non-living systems, in contrast to life science. It in turn has many branches, each referred to as a "physical science", together called the "physical sciences". Definition Phy ...

and

Engineering Engineering is the use of 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 range of more speciali ...

'', ''

Life Sciences This list of life sciences comprises the branches of science that involve the scientific study of life – such as microorganisms, plants, and animals including human beings. This science is one of the two major branches of natural science, th ...

'', ''

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 a ...

'', and ''

Social Sciences Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...

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 t ...

''. 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 JavaS ...

) 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".

References

External links

* {{Reed Elsevier Academic journal online publishing platforms Commercial digital libraries Digital libraries Elsevier Full-text scholarly online databases

Usage

See also

References

Further reading

External links