About SciTech Connect

SciTech Connect is a portal to free, publicly-available DOE-sponsored R&D results including technical reports, bibliographic citations, journal articles, conference papers, books, multimedia, software, and data information, and was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) to increase access to science, technology, and engineering research information from DOE and its predecessor agencies. OSTI is a program within DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. Our mission is to advance science and sustain technological creativity by making R&D findings available and useful to DOE researchers and the American people. Visit About OSTI to learn more.

Launched in 2013, SciTech Connect consolidates two previous DOE search engines, Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database, creating a single search interface for all R&D information. Thus, SciTech Connect contains over seventy years of energy-related citations and full-text documents created and/or collected by OSTI. For more information about this consolidation, read OSTI Launches SciTech Connect, Consolidates Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database.

Contents and Features

SciTech Connect includes technical reports, bibliographic citations, journal articles, conference papers, books, patents and patent applications, multimedia, software, and data information sponsored by DOE through a grant, contract, cooperative agreement, or similar type of funding mechanism from the 1940s to today. This collection continues to grow as new scientific and technical information resulting from DOE research becomes available.

With over 2.85 million citations, SciTech Connect includes citations to 1.5 million journal articles, one million of which have digital object identifiers (DOIs) linking to full-text articles on publishers' websites. Additionally, SciTech Connect holds over 440,000 full-text DOE sponsored STI reports. Most full-text reports are post-1991, although over 143,000 of the reports were published prior to 1991.

Through SciTech Connect, OSTI expanded its deployment of semantic search, an innovative technology to improve the quality and relevance of search results across the majority of its DOE content. Rather than relying on search algorithms that identify a specific query term, semantic search enhances search accuracy contextually, using more complex contextual relationships among people, places and things to create a result set. It is an especially effective search approach when a person is researching a topic (rather than trying to navigate to a particular destination).

An additional tool added for authors is ORCID integration via SciTech Connect. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized. SciTech allows authors, after a short authorization protocol, to link with their ORCID profiles and add records directly to their ORCID Works, saving the need for manual curation of these lists. For more information about using this service, please see our ORCID FAQ.

In addition to semantic search, users may interact with SciTech Connect in a number of ways, including but not limited to: searching, through semantic or term basic searching and advanced options, such as searching authors by ORCID number; filtering results; downloading full-text; exporting citation metadata in a number of formats; creating formatted citations of records; setting up an Alert Service; and more.

For more information on SciTech Connect's options or content, please see our FAQ or for questions or comments, .

Fact Card

• SciTech Connect Fact Card (461 KB)