ScienceDirect
Elsevier's full-text platform — the journals and books behind a huge slice of the world's research.
At a Glance
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Coverage
18M+ articles and book chapters from 2,650+ journals and tens of thousands of books across science, technology, and medicine (verify current counts).
- Access
Institutional subscription; a growing open-access portion is free; abstracts freely searchable.
- Free alternative
- Unpaywall, OpenAlex, PubMed Central for full text where available.
- Regional
Global science, technology, and medicine coverage.
Our Take
ScienceDirect is Elsevier’s full-text delivery platform — where you actually read the articles that Scopus indexes. For institutions with the subscription it is a deep, well-organised source of STM journals and reference works, and the open-access slice keeps growing. But it is a publisher’s own platform: coverage is Elsevier’s catalogue, not the whole literature, and per-article access without a subscription is patchy and expensive. Use it for full text within its catalogue; discover across the whole field with Scopus or OpenAlex, then follow the links out.
Power Tips
- Discover with Scopus or OpenAlex, then use ScienceDirect for the full text of Elsevier titles.
- Check Unpaywall before paying per-article — an open version often exists.
- Do not mistake Elsevier’s catalogue for the whole field; assemble a review across platforms.
Alternatives & Complements
SpringerLink, Wiley Online Library, Scopus, Unpaywall
Figures last verified: June 15, 2026