Subject-Specific Services

In the Subject-Specific Services program unit, we develop and operate globally recognized information services for the subject areas of mathematics, crystallography, and energy. For this purpose, we develop and aggregate relevant sources. All services are aimed at scientists in research. The information service in the field of energy is aimed in particular at basic research.

The main focus is on the renowned, worldwide information service zbMATH Open for mathematics and the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database - ICSD for crystallography.

zbMATH Open is an international, open service for mathematics that provides an uninterrupted record of the worldwide mathematical research literature since 1868. It contains almost five million bibliographic entries with reviews or abstracts. In addition to publications, zbMATH Open offers information on authors and their networks, on journals and their content, on software and on references to research data. In addition, traditional publications are increasingly being supplemented with mathematical software and research data or content on community platforms, which are networked via services such as zbMATH Open and indexed according to scientific criteria. 
 
Our activities to establish the zbMATH Open service are flanked by the acquisition of research projects on information infrastructures with a focus on mathematics. Our research is intended to help create the necessary technical and organizational foundations, make (specialist) knowledge more accessible to the mathematical and scientific community and improve the quality of the scientific process. 

ICSD is a service in the field of crystallography with the world's largest database of fully determined inorganic crystal structures and complementary simulation and visualization tools. The database provides access to approximately 300,000 crystal structures of inorganic and organometallic materials dating back to 1913, i.e,the beginning of X-ray diffraction measurements.
All data is of excellent quality thanks to our curation; only data that has undergone thorough quality controls is included. As the world's leading provider of scientific information on inorganic crystal structures, we take full responsibility for the creation, maintenance and quality control of the database and ensure that the ICSD database and our software solutions meet the highest possible quality standards. The quality of these activities has been recognized with the Core Trust Seal.

ICSD is widely used in materials research, as crystal structures significantly influence the physical properties of a compound. Data mining methods play a major role here, both for the development of new materials and for the optimization of existing ones. Therefore, the product not only aims to provide the most comprehensive collection of well-developed data possible, but is further developed with a focus on, among other things, making relevant structures as comprehensively accessible as possible and linking them to external sources that offer additional information on chemical and physical properties.