Last month ScienceDirect - Elsevier's flagship electronic research solution - celebrated its tenth anniversary and the 10 millionth addition to its database.  Elsevier's news release below looks at the history of ScienceDirect and how it continues to support scientists and researchers around the world.

A decade of solving search and discovery needs of the global scientific research community  
  
On 29 June, Elsevier celebrated the tenth anniversary of ScienceDirect, its online scientific research platform, as well as the 10 millionth addition to the database, which is comprised of full-text articles and book chapters. ScienceDirect became fully operational in 2000 when it surpassed one million articles and launched its backfiles initiative, adding literature published prior to 1994.  It has since become the largest and most extensive resource of its kind.

Created to help scientists quickly find the most relevant content for their specific research objectives by offering search, reference and discovery tools, ScienceDirect has become vital to the daily activities of researchers across the globe. Institutions worldwide currently offer ScienceDirect to their faculty and students, with up to 20 articles downloaded per second from the platform. A springboard to knowledge discovery, ScienceDirect has more than 100 million outbound links to cited or related articles, as well as links to other scientific databases.

“Faculty members and graduate students love using ScienceDirect. It's a good resource to find information on various topics. I highly recommend it to users not familiar with the database.” said Buenaventura Basco, Coordinator, InfoSource, University of Central Florida, USA.

Continuously seeking ways to accelerate research, ScienceDirect underwent a full platform redesign in 2006 focused on navigational improvements. As a result, researchers were able to cut the number of clicks required for some of the most common search activities by 40% to 50%, speeding the knowledge discovery process.

“Over the last ten years ScienceDirect has provided scientists and researchers authoritative and trusted peer-reviewed content helping them harness the specific knowledge needed within the rapidly growing pool of content,” said Rafael Sidi, vice president of product management for Elsevier’s ScienceDirect. “By continuously enriching content and our platform, ScienceDirect has evolved to meet the changing needs of researchers over time. Recent partnerships that enhance ScienceDirect with supplementary data and contextual content from other sources as well as a commitment to open up the platform for third party applications have set the stage for ScienceDirect to lead the way in further advancing search and discovery throughout the next decade.”

Highlights of major ScienceDirect milestones over the last decade include:

• 2000 – Becomes fully operational with one million articles; Implements cross-publisher linking via CrossRef, offering linking to over 10,000 journals.
• 2003 –Achieves full compliance with the international COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases.[1]
• 2006 – One-billionth article downloaded from platform.
• 2007 – Launches first eBooks offering with 4,000 titles published from 1995 going forward.
• 2009 – Opens up to third-party developers such as NextBio to build applications for search and discovery on ScienceDirect.
• 2010 – Links ScienceDirect articles to specialized database content such as PANGAEA for earth research.

The ten millionth full-text article added to database was: Use of Herbal Products and Potential Interactions in Patients With Cardiovascular Diseases, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, authored by , A. Tachjian, V. Maria, A. Jahangir from the Division of Cardiovascular Disease, Mayo Clinic, Rochester and the Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, USA.

[1] The COUNTER Code of Practice is supported by a global organization of librarians, publishers and their professional organizations. It promotes credible, consistent and compatible measurement of usage data from online information resources around the world.