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We thank our user community — the librarians, researchers, faculty members and students — for 25 years of support in making ScienceDirect one of the most highly regarded and valued resources in the quest to advance research for the benefit of society. Read on to see how far we all have come…
While the world prepared for Y2K, science, technology and medicine experienced:
Successful mapping of the entire genetic code of a single human chromosome
Birth of the six billionth human being
3D mapping of Mars
Founding of Alibaba
Launch of ScienceDirect
In 2024, ScienceDirect celebrated a significant milestone in its distinguished history: 25 years of research, scholarship and discovery.
As the needs of scholars, researchers and librarians, their ecosystems and the technologies they use have changed since its launch, ScienceDirect continues to support their work by:
Expanding literature formats beyond journal articles
Broadening subject coverage
Developing tools that enhance the user experience
Updating technologies that simplify access and workflows
Embracing reporting standards, accessibility and open access
And we are poised to do even more in the months and years ahead.
As we celebrate this milestone, we reflect on how our platform has been at the forefront of digital transformation, significantly enhancing the experiences of libraries and librarians alike.
Discover how ScienceDirect's continuous advancements have empowered libraries to evolve, adapt, and thrive in the digital age. Explore our latest article to see how 25 years of innovation have transformed the library landscape.
How libraries have transformed through 25 years of digital innovation.
“The digitization of science has significantly expanded research dissemination, accelerated the discovery and sharing of new knowledge. Over 25 years, ScienceDirect has evolved from a website hosting a few hundred journals to a global platform serving tens of millions of researchers every year. This success and our commitment to strive for excellence and innovation in scholarly publishing is fueled by the trust and usage of ScienceDirect within the research community. Together, we strive to advance science and enhance healthcare outcomes for a better world.”
Rose L'Huillier
Senior Vice President, Researcher Products, Data Science and Analytics, at Elsevier
ScienceDirect.com was launched as the pioneering online platform for peer-reviewed scientific information.
Journal articles, backfiles, major reference works, ebooks and book series
Today, ScienceDirect features:
21M articles
2,900 journals, including 800 fully Gold open access journals
46K books
3.3M OA articles and book chapters
180K articles from scholarly publishing partners
Multimedia Document Download Manager, Related Articles, Citing Articles
Focusing on the user experience is a hallmark of ScienceDirect’s developments.
Article of the Future, three-page article user interface
The ScienceDirect team continues to experiment with presenting information in more dynamic, integrated and user-friendly ways.
New micro-services back-end, experimentation infrastructure, mobile-first responsive user interface, improved and faster search
ScienceDirect loads search results in less than three seconds, saving scholars and researchers valuable time.
Topics pages, online PDF reader, article evaluation through PlumX Metrics
ScienceDirect currently features more than 375K Topics pages.
Enhanced remote access during the COVID pandemic, accessibility, SEO innovations, privacy and security enhancements, GetFTR partnership
ScienceDirect makes discoverability, access, accessibility and data privacy among the highest priorities for users. It is ranked #1 in WAVE WebAIM Million for accessibility.
180K articles added from leading scholarly publishers, product integrations with Scopus and Reaxys, adding Journal Finder, Journal Recommender and Journal Insights pages
ScienceDirect welcomes leading scholarly publishers to the platform through our Content Syndication Partnerships, including Wiley, Taylor & Francis, American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry and others.
The ScienceDirect team is working on furthering the platform’s capabilities to usher in a new era of a personalized user experience.
Guiding principles: user experience, technological innovation and researcher outcomes
Download the InfographicScience has never been more relevant. People around the globe yearn for breakthroughs to move society forward. ScienceDirect facilitates interdisciplinary research and scholarship across peer-reviewed journals and books to inspire research innovation and discovery:
751K newly published articles in 2024, a 17% growth
Almost 1,600 new books added in 2024 alone
Highest cited content of all other publishers (FWCI 1.48) for both open access and subscription content (Source: Scopus)
252K OA articles* published in 2024, 32% increase year-on-year (*excluding Subsidised or ‘Diamond’ OA)
34% of papers published are OA
Average of 62 citations per book, compared to the industry average of 21 (Source: Books indexed in Scopus, 2018-2022)
ScienceDirect is home to trusted, peer-reviewed literature and an integral component in the research community
95% of researchers in the world use ScienceDirect
Highest share of articles in top FWCI journal tiers (Source: Scopus)
Top 200 platform ranking on the internet (Source: Ahrefs ranking, 2025)
140M total monthly visits, two times higher than the next competitor
50M unique monthly visitors
80 article views per second
Throughout our 25-year journey, we've amassed a wealth of remarkable and inspiring research stories from our users, each overcoming formidable challenges on their road to success.
Included here are three such stories, as well as links to the related research published on ScienceDirect. All three researchers were honored among the winners of the 2021 OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Award for Early Career Women Scientists in the Developing World.
For Prof. Marian Asantewah Nkansah, who specializes in environmental chemistry, circumstances continually remind her that science comes with a price tag. Scientists everywhere face this reality, but for those in developing countries, the situation can be even more palpable. “Toxic substances can be found in unusual places,” she explains. “So, I look in places where many scientists don’t go looking.”
Marian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana. There, she teaches Practical Chemistry, Nuclear/Radiochemistry, Chemistry and Society, Petroleum Chemistry, and Research Methods.
Prof. Marian Asantewah Nkansah
The use of lightweight expanded clay aggregate (LECA) as sorbent for PAHs removal from water, Journal of Hazardous Materials
Eugénie Kayitesi spent the first seven years of her life moving from one refugee camp to another as she and her parents fled the civil war in Uganda. She experienced first-hand the devastating effects caused by not having enough food.
This experience led her to the path she is on today. Through her research, Eugénie hopes to improve nutrition, diet and food security in Africa and beyond.
Eugénie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Consumer and Food Sciences at the University of Pretoria South Africa. She has published more than 30 peer-reviewed international journal articles and book chapters, received multiple awards and is a World Academy of Science (TWAS) Young Affiliate.
Eugénie Kayitesi
Infrared heating under optimized conditions enhanced the pasting and swelling behaviour of cowpea starch, International Journal of Biological Macromolecules
A review on the physicochemical properties of starches modified by microwave alone and in combination with other methods, International Journal of Biological Macromolecules
When Dr. Ghada Dushaq was a child, nothing was safe from her prying mind and fingers. If there was a remote control on the coffee table, she would take it apart to figure out how it worked.
In second grade, her curiosity got on her teacher’s nerves.
“She complained to my mom that I was asking too many questions,” Ghada recalled. “‘Why does a banana have no seeds? If you say that our shadow is like a mirror, why don’t we see the exact color? … ‘I don’t know how to answer her.’”
Fortunately, her parents were educators who encouraged her exploration. Today, she continues her exploration as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Photonics Research Lab at NYU Abu Dhabi. Through her research, she is coming up with new and innovative materials for high-speed optical communications.
Dr. Ghada Dushaq
Tuning the optical properties of RF-PECVD grown μc-Si:H thin films using different hydrogen flow rate, Superlattices and Microstructures
Users can access more than 2M articles from other leading publishers directly on ScienceDirect using shared infrastructure with GetFTR, which checks entitlements.
Learn more about our Content Syndication Partnerships.
View citation data from Scopus, available on ScienceDirect article pages.
View chemical and structural data from Reaxys on relevant chemistry articles on ScienceDirect, enhancing chemical insights while reading. Entitled users can then link directly to Reaxys for more details in a single click for a seamless user experience on the platform.
ScienceDirect is innovating with Artificial Intelligence to deliver highly tailored and personalized user experiences. Our goal is to enable users to spend less time searching for information they need so they can spend more time advancing the boundaries of human knowledge. Stay tuned for more information from your Elsevier representative later in 2024.
