Research Platforms

Search and discovery

The incredible volume of available research information stands as both an amazing resource and a daunting challenge. It is easy to get lost in the flood of information available. To help you keep current, Elsevier offers the following free tools:

• Mendeley Feed: When you first log into Mendeley, you'll be greeted with the Newsfeed, which shows you recent activity within your academic network. You can keep an eye on what your connections are adding to their libraries.
• ScienceDirect Personalized Recommendations: Using machine learning and your online activity, you can receive suggested content that you might otherwise miss, tailored specifically to your needs. See your recommendations under your account profile or receive them via email – you can make your research more effective by using this free feature.
• ScienceDirect Alerts: Discover new volume issues of specific journals, book-series or handbooks by setting up alerts, or get notified of new articles on ScienceDirect that match your search queries.
• Free Post-Doc Access to Scopus and ScienceDirect: This program allows you to stay current in your field, even if you are between positions. You get free access to Elsevier’s catalogue as well as to Scopus, the world’s leading A&I database.

Build my knowledge

Finding and evaluating the relevance of information is only the beginning of the journey to building a knowledgebase. Of course, reading is the path to knowing, but without the means to properly collect, organize, retrieve and use literature and data, a true knowledgebase cannot be created. Building a knowledgebase goes beyond creating something for personal use — it means building something that current and future collaborators and even successors can leverage for research success.

• Mendeley Reference Manager: Keeping your personal reference library organized and searchable is an important part of research.  With Mendeley Reference Manager, you can store your annotated research materials and then easily search and cite them.
• ScienceDirect Topics Pages: Improve your reading comprehension about a topic by accessing authoritative, reliable and citable foundational information from Elsevier books and reference works, delivered to you through innovative automated approaches for information extraction and relevancy ranking.
• Open Access Journals: As one of the world’s largest open access publishers, Elsevier has a massive body of freely available, peer-reviewed content.
• Reading  history: When signed in to your free ScienceDirect account, you can keep track of what you have been reading by reviewing, managing and downloading the 100 most recent articles you have viewed.

Showcase my work and demonstrate impact

It’s essential that your research community knows you and your work. Networking and showcasing oneself has always been important to success in research. It’s natural that researchers tend to think first of the people they know personally — or at least virtually — when they are looking for a collaborator, their next hire or even considering which papers to cite. A strong network is also valuable when it comes to getting access to external collaborators and specialized equipment as well as support grant applications.

• Mendeley Showcase – Creating your research profile and including a curated list of your publications and affiliations allows you to easily promote your work to one of the world's largest scientific communities.
• Scopus Author Profile – Your Scopus Author Profile (automatically created by Scopus) showcases various indicators including citation count, publication history and h-index. These metrics may be used for tenure, funding and other research performance-based evaluations so it is important to ensure your profile reflects your information correctly. Search for, update and claim your profile for free.
• SSRN - SSRN is an open-access online preprint community that allows you to share pre-publication manuscripts and credit for your ideas before formal publication.
• Article-level metrics – View the impact and influence a specific article has had in the world of research by seeing directly on the article page its captures, mentions, social media shares and citations.

User guides

• ScienceDirect User Guide – From basic science to current developments, learn how to access more than 3,800 journals and almost 40,000 book titles.
• Mendeley Reference Manager BETA User Guide – Stay on top of your research by using time-saving tools that enable effective reference management.
• Scopus User Guide  – Learn how to use the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, with bibliometrics tools to track, analyze and visualize research.

FAQs and Support

• Mendeley
• Science Direct Support Hub
• Scopus
• SSRN
• Author Support
• Reviewer Support
• All other Elsevier solutions

Learn what’s new on our blogs

• Scopus Blog – Get Scopus updates and learn about how to effectively use the platform
• Mendeley Blog – Meet the team behind Mendeley, keep up-to-date with referencing and learn what is new in the world of research
• SciTech Connect - Research, resources and information for the scientific community, written by the our own authors and editors
• ElsevierConnect - Stories for the science, technology and health communities

Doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers

We support you with access to authoritative full text and tools to help you manage your personal knowledge base, share information and collaborate.

• Dr. Lukasz Porwol, Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG)
  Lukasz studies the potential for virtual reality for collaboration, communication and education. As part of his work, he teaches young researchers how to organize their references and build their knowledge using Mendeley in VR.
• Alexander Mathiasen, Aarhus University, Denmark
  Alexander is working on a PhD dissertation in machine learning with a focus on advancing medical research. He uses Elsevier’s personalized recommenders to stay up to date on the literature in his field.
• Tim Treis, Heidelberg University, Germany
  Tim’s research generates a huge amount of raw data using an incubator microscope he helped build. Being able to keep that data and other research artefacts organized in a database with open APIs is key. Learn how Elsevier supports researcher by offering free, interoperable productivity tool like Mendeley.

Professors, lecturers and tenured academics

• Dr. Anna Farmaki, Cyprus University of Technology
  Anna’s investigates the ways tourism can drive social change, and how bringing people together through travel can affect relations between nations. In the article, she discusses how pre-print servers like SSRN help with her research
• Dr. Rónadh Cox, Williams College, United States
  Rónadh is a geologist who has done interdisciplinary research showing that the storm waves have shifted boulders as big as 620 metric tons – about the same weight as four houses – or 100 elephants. She has showcased her research by publishing in multiple Elsevier journals.

Librarians and information professionals

• Carol Shannon, Informationist, University of Michigan, United States
  Carol teaches information and search techniques to students in clinical departments at the University of Michigan. Here she explains how she uses active learning techniques to help young researchers develop search skills.