Internal Database Training: ScienceDirect

Overview

• Elsevier
• Contents: books, book chapters, peer-reviewed publications, open access (1.4M articles)
• Homepage:
  • basic search
  • advanced search
  • Journals & Books - 4,476 journals + 31,788 books
  • Subject areas w/ popular articles and recent publications
    • personalized recommendations page based on recent signed-in activity
  • Browse by publication A-Z
  • Browse by topic (short term definition, related terms, excerpts from book content)
    • onboarding and interdisciplinary research (beginning to learn about a new concept)
• Summary
  • When searching the library catalog or Reaxys or other indexing databases you might end up landing at Science Direct b/c of the journals and the content that's housed here. 
  • The search features tend to lean toward the more advanced researcher (or one with a citation or knowledge of journal titles).
  • Strong filtering and details of the publication type.
  • The topic pages might be useful for beginning researchers.

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• Recommendations
• History
• Alerts

Advanced search

• Boolean
• EX: soil AND fungi AND bioremediation AND oil
• Article types - very specific
• Journals - autocomplete fields

Results List

• Filters: Research Articles
• Current and pre-proofs
  • article in press - not yet definitive versions (still need additional copyediting, type setting and review, may not have full functionality)
• Article detail page
• Keywords section
• Recommended articles

Journals & Books

• select domain
• select subdomain
• filter by publication type, journal status, access type, accept submissions (weed out discontinued journals)
• Journal detail page
  • status: supports open access, open access
  • CiteScore - avg citations per peer-reviewed document; Scopus (4 years)
  • Impact Factor - avg citations; Clarivate (2 years)

Article Detail Page

• Left column:
  • clickable sections of the article or chapter
  • supplementary materials (figures, charts, datasets)
• Middle:
  • almost always a DOI (no permalink feature)
  • share: social media sites only (no permalink)
  • cite: Mendeley, Refworks, RIS, BibTeX, export citation to text (don't get to pick citation style)
  • * after journal title includes any footnote (whether there's been a correction, it's an opinion piece/letter to an editor within a peer-reviewed article, etc.)
• Right column:
  • recommended articles (within journal mainly)
  • citing articles
  • article metrics (PlumX)