One of the nice features of SciTech Connect is the ability to filter search results by subject and author.  On the Search Results page, these filters are midway down the left side.

The full SciTech Connect database contains over 2.5 million citations.  Filtering the full database by subject [23 MB AVI] shows the top subject in the database to be materials science with 184,200 citations.  Not too far down the top ten list you will also find materials with another 127,916 citations.  While this shows that SciTech Connect is quite strong in this area, the rest of the top subjects are good indicators of the diversity of scientific disciplines found in SciTech Connect.  Note especially environmental sciences as the ninth most frequent subject term.

• materials science (184,198)
• elements (174,970)
• physics (174,180)
• organic compounds (172,389)
• design (157,517)
• oxygen compounds (145,684)
• chemical reactions (142,736)
• materials (127,924)
• environmental sciences (127,863)
• fuels (123,001)

Selecting the Electronic Full-Text tab and filtering by subject [18 MB AVI] will give you a significantly different list of top ten subjects.  Materials science is still high on the list, along with design and environmental sciences, but the other seven subjects are new. 

• design (30,360)
• materials science (27,120)
• particle accelerators (26,523)
• environmental sciences (24,833)
• progress report (22,042)
• performance (20,860)
• physics of elementary particles and fields (15,496)
• nuclear fuels (15,233)
• general and miscellaneous//mathematics, computing, and information science (15,075)
• plasma physics and fusion technology (13,904)

Once you have executed your search in SciTech Connect, Filter by Subject shows the most frequently occurring subject terms that have been assigned to the citations in your search results.  Selecting one of these terms allows you to drill down in your search results to more relevant citations.  The list of subjects also alerts you to terms that are related to you search topic and may be worth searching on their own.

Filtering by author [18 MB AVI] reveals the most prolific contributors to SciTech Connect.  Topping the list, B. Aubert has 837 publications authored or co-authored.  Of that number, 322 are available in full-text.

• Aubert, B. (837)
• Wang, J. (713)
• Eigen, G. (638)
• Chen, Y. (607)
• Wang, Y. (606)
• Abbott, B. (601)
• Zhang, Y. (598)
• Liu, Y. (581)
• Smith, D.L. (563)
• Tisserand, V. (555)

Filtering by author can be helpful when trying to identify researchers who have published extensively on a particular subject.  Performing a search on “electric powered vehicles” and filtering by author [27 MB AVI] returns the following list.

• Yao, N.P. (40)
• Cooper, J.F. (35)
• Gay, E.C. (34)
• Burke, A.F. (31)
• Chilenskas, A.A. (30)
• Pearson, A. (30)
• Markel, T. (29)
• Walsh, W.J. (29)
• Nelson, P.A. (26)
• Cairns, E. J. (24)

The author filter lets you browse the publications of the most prolific authors and also helps identify those authors in subject areas that interest you.