LIVIVO is Europe’s largest search engine for literature and information (research data) in the field of life sciences. It is run by ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences. Drawing on more than 67 million data records, it brings together under one roof the specialist subjects of medicine and health and nutritional, environmental and agricultural sciences. With comprehensive coverage of its core subjects, it supports interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in academic and scientific works.
LIVIVO provides access to ZB MED’s own holdings at its sites in Cologne and Bonn as well as links to about 50 other sources of data, enabling users to conduct comprehensive searches of all the relevant literature. The content integrated in LIVIVO includes key databases such as MEDLINE (bibliographic database of the US National Library of Medicine), AGRICOLA (catalogue of the US National Agricultural Library), and relevant extracts from the open access database BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). As you would expect, the LIVIVO user interface has a responsive design to cater to different user behaviours and environments.
LIVIVO is also closely tied to the ZB MED Knowledge Environment, which was specifically designed as a reliable means of preserving and curating data and adding additional information such as research data and availability. LIVIVO’s search technology is based on and includes components that were specially developed for ZB MED. Highlights include automated linguistic enrichment and semantic linking of search terms using defined vocabulary specifically tailored to the life science arena. This search technology helps users quickly find the information they need.
In the future, LIVIVO plans to offer increased access to research data in its role as an information platform as well as taking on other centralised verification tasks and pushing ahead with further international cooperation. In this way, LIVIVO is steadily evolving into a “one health portal” that encompasses the totality of the life sciences.
What services does LIVIVO offer?
Would you like to make the most of the LIVIVO experience? Simply choose from the following services:
- Setting up your link resolver: LIVIVO can insert a specific location-based button which allows users to check whether items in their hit list are available locally in your institution. To set up this service, please send us the following information: The name of your institution, your link resolver’s base URL, the URL of the button to be displayed and the range of IP addresses within which the button should appear.
- LIVIVO search field on your website: Incorporating the LIVIVO search field on your website allows your users to perform searches directly in LIVIVO. To do this, simply follow the instructions on the LIVIVO help page.
- Keep up-to-date by reading the latest news about LIVIVO: We are constantly striving to make LIVIVO even better. Check out our LIVIVO News page to read about new functions and data sources.
