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ScienceDirect - Twin Cities Library, Saint Mary's University of Minnesota

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ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect is a source for scientific, technical, and medical articles and books. Subject areas covered include biological sciences, business and management science, clinical medicine, economics, technology, environmental science, computer science, neurosciences, pharmacology, and social sciences.

Accessing  |  Searching  |  Saving, Printing, Emailing |  Citing


Accessing ScienceDirect

  • Mouseover the articles, books, & more tab at the top of the Twin Cities Library website, and select Databases.  Choose ScienceDirect from the list.
  • Off-campus users: You will be prompted to enter your Saint Mary's University username and password after you select a database.

Searching ScienceDirect

A very basic search page appears when you open ScienceDirect. To perform a narrowed search with specific keywords and search phrases, click the link Search in the green banner under the ScienceDirect logo. Then click the Journals tab at the top of the subsequent page.

Searching ScienceDirect

Saving, Printing, and Emailing Search Results

To email yourself article citations and links to article full text (ScienceDirect does not email the full text of articles), check the boxes next to the articles you’d like to email, and then click Email articles. (To access the full text from off campus you’ll have to log in with your SMU username and password again.) If you want to email yourself the full text PDFs, you will need to download and save the article PDF to your desktop, then attach the PDF file to an email addressed to yourself.

ScienceDirect results page

Note: You can also register for a free ScienceDirect account, so you can save your searches and marked articles. See the register/log-in box located on the top right of the page.

What if my article is not available in full text?

Articles will be available in PDF full text (see screenshot above). If article full text is not available, you will not see an icon. Instead, look for the Fulltext-SMU after you open each article record by clicking its hyperlinked title. FULLTEXT-SMU is TC Library's full text linking system. If you find an article citation in one database (i.e. ScienceDirect) but cannot access the full text, FULLTEXT-SMU links you to other databases that do carry that article in full text. If no databases carry the full text of the article, FULLTEXT-SMU takes you to TC Library's Interlibrary Loan page.


Citing Articles

ScienceDirect has a basic citation generator. On your results list, select the boxes neyxt to the article(s) you'd like to cite. Click the Export citations link at the top of the page. On the next page under Export format, select ASCII format. Select Export. The subsequent page gives you all the information you need for your citation, but you will need to delete some information and format it to APA 6th edition style.
Note: You can export citations to citation management software programs (like RefWorks or EndNote) but Saint Mary's does not offer access to any of this software.