Scilit—developed and maintained by MDPI—is a multidisciplinary, free scholarly database that indexes scientific material by extracting the latest data from CrossRef, PubMed and other sources on a daily basis.

This means that newly published articles are added to Scilit almost immediately. It is a comprehensive database, covering all subjects from arts and humanities, behavioral sciences and social sciences to medicine and pharmacology, physical sciences, mathematics and computer science, chemistry and biology.

How to use Scilit

Visitors to Scilit can retrieve information about publications, journals and publishers free of charge. Publications can be searched based on title, abstract, or authors, or a combination of these fields. Search results include title, authors, published date, digital object identifier (DOI), a link to the publisher’s website, abstract, comments from SciForum, and related articles.

Readers also have access to information related to all the publishers included in our database (DOI prefix, journals, articles and website). Publishers now have the possibility to login and import their articles in order to improve the accuracy of content. As of 2017, 8896 publishers appear in Scilit.

Based on Scilit data, two other public services have been developed—Scitations and SciFeed. Scitations is a citation alert service that notifies authors of scholarly papers when their publications are cited in new articles published by participating journals. SciFeed keeps readers informed by email as soon as new articles matching a customized query are published.

Updates to the scholarly database

Scilit now also indexes preprints: scholarly articles that have not yet been peer reviewed and published in an academic journal. In most cases, these are considered as drafts and can be updated and resubmitted at any time. A search of preprints can be made directly from the Scilit website, or from Preprints, our free, non-profit, multidisciplinary preprint platform for sharing early versions of papers.

The fast pace of change in the world of technology has had a huge impact on academic publishing. Therefore, Scilit aims to make research outputs more accessible and ensure it reaches relevant researchers, industry partners, policy makers, and other interested parties as quickly as possible.

So, if you want to learn more about this free, multidisciplinary scholarly database, we have more recent content available. Why not begin with Using New Search Technology With Scilit, which outlines the updates implemented to the database in 2023.