A new electronic resource at the MIT Libraries gives the community online access to the full text of articles in journals published by Elsevier Science, even if MIT doesn't actually subscribe to those publications.
The new resource, ScienceDirect, provides access to more than 1,100 Elsevier journals in science, engineering, economics, business and management. Users can browse through tables of contents or search by author, title, keyword or date in a single journal, across all journal titles or across a subset of journals. Searches can be saved to run again later, or saved as an alert that will notify the user by e-mail as new articles on that topic are added to the database.
ScienceDirect also navigates from articles listed in cited references to other articles within the ScienceDirect database. This means that many of the footnotes in an article are hyperlinked so that it's easy to move from the footnote of one article to the actual article cited.
Beyond the Elsevier journals, the database also helps users search the publications of organizations such as the American College of Cardiologists, the Federation of European Biochemical Societies, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, CRC Press, ASM International, the Royal Society of Medicine and the International Brain Research Organization.
Elsevier journals in chemistry, materials science, engineering disciplines, environmental science, economics, business and management, neurosciences, pharmacology and toxicology, physics, mathematics and computer science, earth sciences, biochemistry, microbiology and immunology, biological sciences and clinical medicine are included.
Examples of journal titles in science and engineering are Biochimica et Biophysical Acta, Topology, Brain Research, Aircraft Design and Biomaterials. Titles in other fields include Economics Letters, Energy Policy, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Monetary Economics, Research Policy and World Development.
For web access through the MIT Libraries, go to http://libraries.mit.edu/vera and follow the instructions. Or go directly to the ScienceDirect web site at http://www.sciencedirect.com.
Further information is available from Michael Noga at the Science Library, mnoga@mit.edu, x3-1290, and from any of the library subject specialists listed at http://libraries.mit.edu/sub-spec.html.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 15, 2000.
