ScienceDirect is a website which provides subscription-based access to a

large database of scientific and medical research. It hosts over 12 million

pieces of content from 3,500 academic journals and 34,000 e-books.[2][3]
The journals are grouped into four main sections: Physical Sciences and
Engineering, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Social Sciences and
Humanities. Article abstracts are freely available, but access to their full texts
(in PDF and, for newer publications, also HTML) generally require a
subscription or pay-per-view purchase.
ScienceDirect is Elseviers peer-reviewed, full-text database of nearly
26,000 book titles
and more than 2,500 journal titles. In addition to sophisticated search and
retrieval tools,
ScienceDirect includes content integrated from a variety of external sources
in the form
of audio, video and datasets.

scienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com), as a product of Elsevier

Science--itself a subsidiary of publishing giant Reed Elsevier plc--is a
dominant entity in the online journal market today.

Touting itself on a previous version of its home page as "Science at the Speed
of the 21st Century," ScienceDirect is best described as a "megasource" for
over one million online articles, dated 1995 to present, which are available
from more than 1,100 journals from Elsevier companies and other
participating publishers. By agreement, additional publishers and information
providers participate bibliographically in ScienceDirect, listing their articles
but providing only abstracts, not full text.

Elsevier Science describes ScienceDirect as one of the largest science,

technology, and medicine--or STM--online full-text article databases in the
industry. Indeed, a running count of the number of articles available is posted
on the home page. The bulk of the included journals are from the so-called
hard sciences and engineering, with many biomedical journals also included.
Note that the term "science" in ScienceDirect is used in the broadest

academic sense to include the social sciences with some business,

economics, management, and library science journals also available.

DELIVERY PLATFORM OPTIONS

As an information provider, ScienceDirect offers a vast and powerful yet

somewhat-confusing array of services designated as a "family of products"
that is available on different platforms to institutional customers, i.e.,
libraries, research centers, government agencies, or sci/tech companies.
These customers choose a platform from the suite of services offered. Each of
these services provides access to a set of selected full-text (HTML or PDF)
journals as online subscriptions.

The available ScienceDirect service platform options are:

* On the Internet via the WorldWide Web as ScienceDirect

* On the customer's local integrated library platform as ScienceDirect OnSite

* On intranet installations as ScienceServer (http://www.scienceserver.com)

ScienceDirect also offers over 850 full-text journals for loading onto local
servers in two products: ADONIS Document Delivery Services and ADONIS
Electronic Journal Subscriptions. In all these scenarios, institutions specify
which journals they want to subscribe to via their selected ScienceDirect
service platform and they are charged accordingly. In ScienceDirect on the
Web, end-users can browse or search the entire set of included online
journals, but they can only access full-text articles in the journals to which
their institution subscribes. The other full-text articles can be purchased
individually.

OTHER DIRECTS

There is a designated "entry-level" Elsevier Science Web product titled

ScienceDirect Web editions (http://www.Web-editions.com). It provides online
access at no additional cost to the latest 12 months of an institution's set of
subscribed Elsevier Science print journals.
SEARCHING
With ScienceDirect, you can start your search using the search bar at the top
of the page, or use the Advanced Search form for specific searches.
Quick search

Enter search terms in the appropriate fields and click the search icon.

Advanced search

Go to the Advanced search form to search specific items or access

your search history

(must be registered).

Search across all sources; or specifically for journals, books,

reference works or images.

Enter search terms in the space(s) provided, select which fields you
wish to search (article, title, etc.), and use Boolean operators to
combine search terms.

Refine your search to journals, books, open access articles, subject

area and/or years.

USING YOUR SEARCH RESULT

About your search results : Displays the number of search
results.
Set a search alert: Notifies you by email (Save search alert) or
RSS (RSS Feed) when a new article matching your search
criteria becomes available (requires Sign in).

Sort Options

By default, search results are listed by relevance. You can

change this to list by date.

Filter by access types

Choose to view All access types, only Open Access articles, or
only Open Archive articles.

Export Citation Information

Export citation information for the selected article(s) directly
to Mendeley or RefWorks, or into a preferred format.

Download PDFs
Download full-text PDFs of selected articles all at once and
automatically assign them names based on specified rules

It may be helpful to know how ScienceDirects search engine works.

n Search terms are not case-sensitive, so it does not matter if you use
lowercase or uppercase letters.
n Entering singular nouns will also search for plural nouns and possessives
(with some exceptions).
n Entering search terms using either US or UK spellings will search for both
(with some exceptions).
n
Multiple words set off by spaces will search for documents or images with
both words.
n You can use either quote marks or curly brackets to search for a phrase,
but the results will differ in these ways:
Searches in quote marks (such as heart-attack) will be fuzzy searches
the search engine will search for plural

and singular nouns, US and UK spellings, ignore symbols and punctuation,

and allow wildcards.
Searches in curly brackets (such as {heart-attack}) will be exact searches.
The search engine will look only for that
exact phrase, including symbols or punctuation.