ScienceDirect Collection Reaches 5 Million Full-Text Articles

Elsevier announced that five million articles are now available on its premier electronic platform, ScienceDirect®. This milestone in electronic scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing means that researchers around the globe will be able to quickly and efficiently access an unsurpassed critical mass of information at the convenience of their desktop.

Elsevier's extensive and unique full text collection covers over 1800 journals from the core scientific literature including titles such as THE LANCET, Cell and Tetrahedron. With ScienceDirect the research process is enhanced with state-of-the-art searching and linking functionality all on a single, intuitive interface.

The ScienceDirect full-text collection has grown dramatically over the course of the last year. "Less than a year ago there were 3 million articles in the collection," say Arie Jongejan, CEO Science & Technology. "We increased our investments significantly over the last year in bringing more peer reviewed research to our users, which means that they will have unparalleled access to the world's STM literature."

The rapid growth of the ScienceDirect collection is due, in part, to the ongoing addition of the backfiles - heritage collections in a number of disciplines. In 2001 Elsevier embarked on an ambitious project to digitize all of its journals back to volume one, issue one. These historical collections represent part of Elsevier's commitment to ensure that the scientific research community will have functional access to the electronic versions of journal articles.

"We live in an age where research crosses disciplines and borders," says Eefke Smit, Managing Director of ScienceDirect and Bibliographic Databases. "With a collection of full-text articles that is so broad, and so deep, researchers now have the most comprehensive full text collection of peer reviewed articles anywhere in the world, covering an estimated 25% of the world literature on one platform."

The five millionth article loaded onto ScienceDirect is entitled "Amide rotamers of N-acetyl-1,3-dimethyltetrahydroisoquinolines: synthesis, variable temperature NMR spectroscopy and molecular modelling" by Charles B. de Koning, Willem A. L. van Otterlo and Joseph P. Michael of the Molecular Sciences Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. The article appears in Elsevier's leading organic chemistry journal Tetrahedron, Volume 59, Issue 42, Pages 8337-8345.

In addition to an extensive full-text journal collection, ScienceDirect has increased its offering of other types of full-text content, such as the recently launched reference works program, which is an expanding program of online reference works in all fields of science that seamlessly interlinks with primary research referenced in journals.

Source: Elsevier