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Science Direct: Science Direct Basics

How to get the best results from the database Science Direct

What is ScienceDirect?

ScienceDirect logScienceDirect is the search interface for journals and books from Elsevier, one of the world's premier publishers in science, technology, and medicine. We have many current journals in ScienceDirect (back to 1995), a few back files (up to 1995), and a few books.

How to Search Science Direct

The Quick Search will search all available full text resources, whether or not we have access to them. An advanced search, with more search options is available from the Search button.

Science Direct Buttons

In the All Sources tab, you can search within journals, books, and databases, whether or not we have full text access. The default search will search all journals and books in the database (see the check boxes under the search boxes). You can select a particular subject, and limit the search by years.

Green icons next to the search results indicate that we subscribe to the full text for that title/year. A white icon indicates that only the abstract is available.

Searching full text only:

To search only those journals to which we have full text access, click on the Journals tab above the search box. Change Source: (under the search boxes) to Subscribed Journals. Enter your search words and make any changes to the subject, type of documents, dates, etc.

To view a list of all subscribed journals in Science Direct, or to search for a particular journal, click on the Browse button.
Science Direct Buttons

Display full text journals

 

Viewing and searching full text journals by journal title:

To view all full text journals available, choose All Journals and Book Series, and check only the Subscribed box. Then click the Apply arrow to change the results.

Click on a title to see a list of issues. A journal title will be included on the list if we have access to the full text of any issue, so be sure to look for the green "subscribed" icon in the issue list.

 

Related Articles

To the right of an article abstract will be a box for Related Articles. These articles use similar keywords to the article you are looking at. Hover over a title to read the abstract. Green icons indicate subscribed full text, white icons are abstract only.

You can also look at the References (sources cited by the current article) and "Cited by" (sources that cite the current article).