Due to the interdisciplinary nature of research and the continuously advancing world of science, you will encounter unknown terms and concepts at every stage of your scientific career and will require background, contextual knowledge to progress.

Literature searches are undertaken with the hope that they will rapidly reveal comprehensive, reliable and understandable results. But traditional search tools often don’t create paths that guide you to the foundational sources you need when you need them, especially while reading an advanced journal article.

Enter ScienceDirect Topics.

ScienceDirect Topics is a new innovative enhancement to connect your literature searches and bring the path of discovery to you.

Using smart technology, innovative algorithms and natural language processing, we have eliminated the overwhelming and disjointed characteristics of the traditional research workflow.

ScienceDirect Topics offers tens of thousands of free topic pages, each containing key contextual information taken from reference books, providing definitions, snippets and related terms.

Explore an example topic page

Since many researchers, academics and students initially use search engines to find foundational information about a topic, we have made over 80,000 topic pages freely accessible via search engines such as Google. Each page provides a quick, comprehensive overview of a topic and offers an ideal starting point for searches on topics of interest.

Additionally, as the primary point of interaction with scholarly material is at the journal level, the topic pages are hyperlinked from key terms right within journal articles to help readers rapidly interpret and understand those articles with reliable, relevant definitions and overviews taken from a range of book content.

By integrating book and journal content, we have created an interactive, seamless and convenient reading experience that provides fundamental knowledge at your point of need. The topic pages enable you to navigate scientific literature with improved efficiency, whether you’re investigating something within your area of expertise or unfamiliar concepts and terms.

The embedded links allow access to targeted information from multiple interdisciplinary book sources, exposing connections across disciplines and enabling deeper exploration of topics if desired. The topic pages are visually appealing and intuitive, offering a comprehensive overview in a digestible format.

ScienceDirect Topics is currently available in Neuroscince, Biomedical Sciences and Life Sciences and will be expanding to other subject domains over the next few months.

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