Smithsonian Research Online is a set of services to the Smithsonian research community. Managed by the Smithsonian Libraries, the program assists in capturing the published research output of Smithsonian scholars and making it available to Institutional administration as well as scientists and historians world-wide.

The two primary components of the service are a bibliography of published works and a repository containing digital editions of these publications. These two elements are complementary with the content of the Smithsonian Digital Repository is a sub-set of the items listed in the Smithsonian Research Bibliography.

All Smithsonian units are encouraged to contribute citations of staff publications to the Research Bibliography. The Bibliography collects approximately 2000 citations from 15-20 Smithsonian units per year. Inclusion of the corresponding publication to the Repository, while optional at this time, is widely supported in principle.

Several museums and departments currently re-use the data from Smithsonian Research Online to create dynamic web pages for individuals and their publication lists. The items listed on these curatorial web pages are hyper-linked to the Repository where there is a corresponding full text item available. Additionally, the data collected by the SRO program is incorporated into the Smithsonian Dashboard and the Smithsonian Collections Search Center.