Due to scheduled maintenance by the publisher, Elsevier, the database, ScienceDirect will be unavailable on Saturday, January 23rd from 8 am to 8 pm.

Upgrades are being loaded as part of the maintenance. Here are publisher provided details on the upgrade.

ScienceDirect Upgrades

Following the latest platform release on January 23, 2010, ScienceDirect will help solve the following challenges:

Better reading experience

“Finding what I’m looking for quickly on an article page is not that easy given that it now contains a lot of features and functionality.”
The article/chapter page has been redesigned to improve the online reading experience. There is now a better balanced design and focus on the article and its related features helping researchers to accelerate their scientific research as well as increase research productivity.

Extension of graphical abstracts for chemists

“As a researcher in the chemistry field I know I can easily evaluate an article by looking at the abstract enriched with visual representations of elements such as chemical structures. Why not use these graphical abstracts in RSS feeds and email alerts?”
Graphical abstracts have been extended to email alerts, RSS feeds and ‘email article’ functionality to allow researchers from the Chemistry field to more quickly evaluate articles.

Better books search

“It’s not that easy to find book volumes that I know should be available on ScienceDirect. At the moment only the title of the series is searchable and not all volumes associated with it.”
Individual volume titles have been added to the “Browse” and “Quick Search” options on ScienceDirect. This will enable users to immediately find any book on ScienceDirect, whether it is known to them by the series name or by the volume title.

Advanced and expert search available off campus

“When I’m searching on ScienceDirect while not within my institution’s IP range I can only perform a Quick Search whereas at my institution I benefit also from the Advanced and Expert Search functionality.”
Information retrieval has been made easier for non-licensed and off-campus/remote users by opening-up the Advanced and Expert Search for all users. In addition, all users can now also benefit from setting up search alerts, save searches and RSS functionality available from the Quick Search result page (this is already available in Advanced and Expert search).

More search refinement

“When researching a new topic or moving into an adjacent field of research my searches often return too many results, which makes it harder for me to find what I’m looking for.”
ScienceDirect suggests “Topics” in the form of keywords that you can effortlessly add to your current search in order to refine it further and easily get to the results you need. The Topics are terms that appear frequently within the articles in your current search results set. This provides you three benefits:

1.You can see at a glance whether the current set of results is on track for what you are looking for, by scanning the most frequently occurring terms.
2.You can easily select additional terms from the list to add to your search, thereby drilling down to the results you need.
3.You may also discover new terms or Topics you were not previously aware of, which will help you find new and novel insights.