The Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has launched a new database product called SciTech Connect.

SciTech Connect consolidates the contents of OSTI’s Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database, and will gradually replace these products. SciTech Connect employs an innovative semantic search tool enabling users to retrieve more relevant information. Other features include faceting, in-document search, word clouds, and personalization.

SciTech Connect’s semantic search technique is known as keyword-to-concept mapping. It accepts keyword-based queries and returns concept-mapped queries as in a taxonomy; a search term is mapped to other associated terms, including narrower and related concepts.

The semantic search is utilized only in the Basic Search. The Advanced Search uses the traditional word/phrase search. With this semantic search, Basic Search will generally return a significantly higher number of search results than Advanced Search. Compare the results of a search for “Greenhouse Effect” in Advanced Search.

Included in SciTech Connect are scientific and technical research results in disciplines of interest to DOE such as chemistry, physics, materials, environmental science, geology, engineering, mathematics, climatology, oceanography, and computer science. It includes bibliographic citations to report literature, conference papers, journal articles, books, dissertations, and patents.

There are over 2.5 million citations in SciTech Connect, including citations to 1.4 million journal articles, 368,000 of which have digital object identifiers (DOIs) linking to full-text articles on publishers’ websites. SciTech Connect also has over 316,000 full-text DOE sponsored scientific and technical reports; most of these are post-1991, but close to 85,000 of the reports were published prior to 1990.