A training session on ScienceDirect was held last Thursday in the Library, delivered by Chris James and Rogier Van Erkel from Elsevier. Those attending included teaching staff, research students and library staff from Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Napier and Queen Margaret Universities.
If you haven’t used ScienceDirect before, ScienceDirect is a collection of over 2000 full text journals published by Elsevier. The Library subscription gives access to the full text from 1995 onwards of over 1000 journals, and bibliographic details and abstracts are available for articles published before 1995. ScienceDirect is available from the list of databases on the Library website.
The session began with some general facts about ScienceDirect:
- Approximately 1000 english language research articles were published globally in 2006, 25% of these were published by Elsevier journals.
- 11 million researchers worldwide have access to ScienceDirect.
- At peak hours almost 5000 researchers are online simultaneously.
- 36 full text downloads every second during an average working day.
- In 2007 over 385 million full text articles were downloaded in total.
Some useful features of ScienceDirect were demonstrated, logging into ScienceDirect allows you to personalise your homepage and set up quick links to your favourite journals, articles and websites. You can also view your previous actions such as your recent searches and downloads.
Logging in also allows you to set up search alerts, which will notify you by email when new articles meet your search criteria. You can also create:
- Topic alerts
- Volume/issue alerts
- Citation alerts
These alerts are also available as RSS feeds which you can view using your feedreader (more information on RSS feeds is available from Keeping up to date on the Library website).
Another feature demonstrated was the top 25 hottest articles, these are the top articles currently being downloaded by other ScienceDirect users, you can also view the top 25 in specific subject areas.
A new service which was launched in 2007 is 2collab. This service is freely available to all and is a collaboration platform designed specifically for researchers in the science, technical and medical communities.
2collab provides three types of features:
- Online bookmarking and reference management
- Groups- for sharing with existing networks, or building new ones
- Networking- find, evaluate and initiate contact with new people
If you want to find out more of the different features of ScienceDirect, check out the online guides and tutorials
Catherine Ure
Subject Librarian
Posted by Roddy MacLeod
