Subject portals

Subject portals are collections of links, thematically structured around certain subjects and usually created for specific users. For example, the portals created at university libraries aim to meet teaching, learning, and research needs and are primarily meant for university members.

For example

• SSRN Social Science Research Network is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. SSRN encourages the early distribution of research results by distributing submitted abstracts. SSRN’s eLibrary contains almost 900 000 abstracts and over 750 000 full-text papers from almost half a million authors. The network encourages readers to communicate directly with authors.
• EU portal The website gives basic information on how the EU works, the latest EU news, and links to EU information on the websites of EU institutions and agencies.

NB! Subject portals very often contain links to databases whose content the search engines cannot find, or there might not be information available about the content (library catalogues, document databases, statistics publications, reference works, etc.).

Search engines of the portals can perform searches in different types of data sets (library catalogues, licenced databases, full texts on the Internet and in research archives, etc.). Therefore, it is impossible to specify by the manner of search whether we are dealing with an independently created database or with a search engine that performs meta-searches in selected databases.