ScienceDirect- a Place to Do

Research
Graeme Whitley, Director of Publisher Licensing, ScienceDirect

For most p e o p l e these days, the of these floors (and expanding into Several individual publishers have
Internet has b e c o m e a boring thing to the corridors too!): this is universally attempted to provide a partial solution
read about - " e " this and "dot.corn" recognized to be far too m u c h to (e.g. IDEAL - Academic Press, Link -
that, with most of it being used for k e e p track of effectively and certainly Springer Verlag etc) w h i ch offers com-
purposes straying very far from its far too m u c h to actually read and prehensive coverage of journals pro-
research roots - from the questionable digest. As a result of this researchers duced by these publishers. However,
to the banal - pictures of the family h a v e d e v e l o p e d strategies for tracking multi-publisher sites such as
vacation, for example, or e-mail spam the latest literature. Th ese include ScienceDirect w h i c h includes journals
hyping a way to get rich quick or other c o n c e n tr a ti ng on a small core of most from a g r o w i n g list of publishers
even more unsavory subjects. relevant titles, subscribing to alerting including Elsevier, AIChE, ASM
services so that w e can scan the International, CRC Press, the Minerals
However, developments currently tak- tables of contents of the important Metals and Materials Society (TMS),
ing place on the world wide w e b may journals w e d o n ' t read, but should, Institute of Materials, A n d e r s o n

ScienceDirect Facts
The Lexis Nexis data center, in which ScienceDirect is physically housed, is a The data center has been up for over 20 years.
hardened facility, said to be able to withstand a tornado or terrorist attack.
Multiple Internet Service Providers ensure that if even three or four Internet
Even with a catastrophic event, the system is fully backed up and can be live backbones go down, ScienceDirect stays up.
again within 24 to 48 hours of a catastrophic event (but let's not test this).
At the time that this was written ScienceDirect's content comprised over
Approximately 60% of the world's literature in materials science is loaded as 830,000 full text articles
full text onto ScienceDirect each year. As additional publishers contribute their
content, this will increase to 70%. Adding abstracts to the full text, this Every year, if each journal page were stacked together, the published pages
increases to over 85%. going into ScienceDirect would stack over 25 stories high.
The data center is the largest IBM server site in the Americas. All of this data can be searched in less than 30 seconds using the Lexis
A comprehensive research session of scope similar to ScienceDirect would search engine, which consistently ranks among the top two search engines in
take several weeks using print. the world.

The system is multitiered and has multitiered levels of support (so it is never Over 30% of the world's literature in chemistry is loaded as full text onto
down except for routine maintenance). ScienceDirect each year. Including abstracts coverage is 75-80%.

Using an abstracting and indexing service and paper document delivery, the same 88% of researchers surveyed who used ScienceDirect said they found what
research session could take from 1 to 3 days until receipt of the printed matter. they were looking for in one session.
The data center has an up time of 99.97%. Sources:Andrew Dent, Chief Technologist,ScienceDirect; PaulMostert, Product
Manager, Content,ScienceDirectOnsite; Graeme Whitley, Directorof Publisher
The average time it takes to complete a research session using ScienceDirect
is less than 15 minutes.
Licensing

provide some real tangible benefits for and - if w e are lucky - getting gradu- Publishing, International Press, and
researchers. Tools have been devel- ate and postdoctoral students to do Royal Society of Medicine, is beginning
o p e d and c o o p e r a t i o n s have b e e n the literature r e v i e w for all of the lit- to offer a service w h i ch really satisfies
agreed b e t w e e n some of the most erature w e have no h o p e of ever read- the demands of users of scientific
unlikely partners that will undoubted- ing. As information proliferates, the information.
ly make the task of keeping up with v e r y c o n c e p t of k e e p i n g up has
the latest published research easier, b e c o m e an elusive goal and an appar- Why is this important? For the first
less time-consuming and, almost cer- ently futile endeavor. time in the history of research, a
tainl}; more thorough. g o o d deal of the w o r l d ' s research is
It has for several years been clear that available on the researcher's d e s k t o p
Annually, the total world research out- what is required is a single electronic or b e n c h t o p in real time. T h e s e
put, if stacked flat in single pages, (searchable and interlinked) platform online systems n o w have links from
w o u l d measure perhaps an equivalent w h i c h offers access to all journals that r e f e r e n c e s and abstracts to o t h e r arti-
of a h u n d r e d story building, with might be of interest. cles or abstracts w i t h i n their systems
materials science c o m p r i s i n g several and in o t h e r systems, w h i c h in turn

Materials Today
]ScienceDirect - a Place to Do Research

have links to o t h e r related articles. While ScienceDirect cannot claim to Robert Makowski, Director of
This is a true w e b of information. be c o m p l e t e l y c o m p r e h e n s i v e in Publishing Services of TMS said,
With this, researchers can b r o w s e Materials Science, it does n o w contain "ScienceDirect offers the full-text
and search for specific i n f o r m a t i o n over 60% of all materials science online format and searchability that
doing full text searching in m a n y research, 26 of the top 50 cited jour- TMS journal readers want.This associa-
cases. nals (according to ISI's Journal Citation tion promises to broadly e n h a n c e the
Reports 8 for 1998) and substantial online presence of the journals by fur-
In b u i l d i n g ScienceDirect, Elsevier links to related areas such as chem- ther disseminating vital information to
Science based m u c h of its effort o n istry, physics and engineering. Indeed the global c o m m u n i t y of materials sci-
the findings of the TULIP project, to create a central online context for ence and engineering professionals."
w h i c h had distributed 43 materials the c o n d u c t of materials research.
science journals to university
libraries by i n t e r n e t and CD-ROM ASM,TMS, IoM, Elsevier and other pub- American Instituteof Chemical Engineers
delivery. O n e of the central findings lishers believe it is going to be to the Acta Metallurgica Inc.
American College of Cardiologists
of this study, and o n e that in hind- research c o m m u n i t y ' s advantage to American Society for Mass Spectrometry
sight seems fairly obvious, is that have all of this data available in one Anderson Publishing
researchers prefer to c o n d u c t their place, rather than leaving researchers ASM International
CRC Press
research w i t h i n a c o n t e x t that has a to have to sift through each respective Elsevier Science including: Pergamon,
p r e p o n d e r a n c e of the literature they site. North-Holland, The Lancet
w a n t or feel they need. If this is true European Neural Network Society
Excerpta Medica
for Elsevier w h i c h even d u r i n g the Beginning in October, 1999, materials FEBS (Federationof European Biochemical
TULIP e x p e r i m e n t could lay claim scientists are n o w able to do their Societies)
to 40% of the w o r l d ' s materials research o n journals from ASM FEMS (Federationsof European Microbiological
Societies)
literature it is doubly true for smaller International, The Minerals Metals and International Academy of Astronautics
publishers. For this reason, Materials Society, CRC Press, and International Association on Water Quality
ASM I n t e r n a t i o n a l , TMS a n d CRC Elsevier Science all in one context - International Brain ResearchOrganization
International Press
Press have already i n c l u d e d t h e i r ScienceDirect. Other publishers, such International Solar Energy Society
j o u r n a l s ' c o n t e n t in ScienceDirect as Cahners Publishing, will also be fea- Japanese Neural Network Society
and the Institute of Materials are turing their journals on this powerful Japan Society of Fluid Mechanics
The Minerals Metals and Materials Society
in the process of joining the system research platform in the c o m i n g World Federation of Neurology
too. months.

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8 Materials Today