ScienceOpen review
Free scholarly search with recommendations, citation connections, collections, and impact metrics.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
ScienceOpen is a web-based platform for searching and discovering scholarly research. Researchers and others exploring publications can search content, authors, and collections without membership. Its discovery experience extends beyond a list of results: article records connect through citations, authors, keywords, and journals, helping readers follow relationships across scholarly work. Recommendations and impact metrics add further ways to assess and explore articles, while citation exports support moving records into other research workflows.
Search results can be filtered and sorted by Altmetric score, and users can inspect citation, usage, and Altmetric impact metrics. ScienceOpen also supports recommendations, comments, and post-publication peer reviews, so the platform includes ways to add context to published work as well as find it. Citation records can be exported in BibTeX, EndNote, or RIS formats. ORCID is the listed integration: a free membership lets researchers connect an ORCID record and import or showcase a research record. These features make ScienceOpen more suited to scholarly discovery and research organization than to broad, general-purpose search.
Search and exploration are freely accessible, while a free membership enables researchers to publish work, connect ORCID, organize collections, and track impact. Collections can be private or public. This distinction matters for readers who only need to find papers: they can search without joining, while researchers seeking to maintain a record or curate collections will need an account. Choose ScienceOpen if article recommendations, citation relationships, collections, or impact indicators are useful to your research process. It is less suited to people looking for discovery outside scholarly publications or who need a wider range of listed integrations.
ScienceOpen pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Explore article connections through citations, authors, keywords, and journals
- Recommend articles and organize research in private or public collections
- Export citation records as BibTeX, EndNote, or RIS
- Where it doesn't
- Publishing work and several researcher features require free membership
- Discovery is focused on scholarly content rather than general web search
- Impact tracking centers on citation, usage, and Altmetric metrics
ScienceOpen fact sheet, pricing and score →
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