Embarking on a path to discovery in a world of disconnected information is overwhelming. As you attempt to follow the thread of your hypothesis through a literature search, it is easy to be led astray by misinformation, dead-ends, siloed knowledge, and well-trodden paths. The result is a lost thread where information is elusive, and knowledge may never be truly acquired.

Researchers at every stage of their scientific careers encounter novel terms and concepts and require contextual knowledge to fully grasp and interpret scholarly material.  Literature searches are undertaken with the hope that they will rapidly reveal comprehensive, reliable and understandable results. But sometimes available literature search tools don’t give you that understanding.

Books contain the valuable contextual knowledge base and framework required to make sense of a new or evolving field. Traditionally however, the answers from books that can lead you to better decisions, and help spark new insights, are not easily accessible during an online search or in the midst of reading a journal article.

Though the combination of smart technology and high-quality content, Elsevier has released a new functionality to solve this challenge, ScienceDirect Topics. This enhancement provides a necessary bridge between journal and book content and contributes to a more natural research workflow for researchers, academics and students. Offering tens of thousands of free topic pages, each containing key contextual information taken from reference books, providing definitions, snippets and related terms, ScienceDirect Topics brings the path of discovery to you.

The topic pages are seamlessly hyperlinked via key terms within journal articles and scholarly literature on ScienceDirect to speed your research and learning. The topic pages are also accessible through search engines such as Google to offer a free layer of content users seeking a quick overview to a subject.

With ScienceDirect Topics, researchers now have rapid access to the most relevant content – filtered to prevent information overload — right when and where they need it.

With science becoming more interdisciplinary, the information you can now retrieve through topic pages provides the key contextual knowledge for you to make cognitive leaps and efficiently get up to speed on a topic of interest. The enhancement is optimized for research, teaching and learning, offering information seekers – from students to the most seasoned researchers – credible, accurate and relevant content, right at the point of need in their workflows. Currently available in more than 80,000 pages in life sciences, biomedical sciences and neuroscience, ScienceDirect Topics are free to access and will expand into several other subject domains over the next few months.

Explore the most popular topic pages today!

1. Sanger Sequencing
2. Reticular Activating System
3. Squamous Epithelial Cell
4. Hyperreflexia
5. Fasciculation
6. Parietal Lobe
7. Biopsychosocial Model
8. Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction