Smithsonian Research Online is a set of services to the research community both within and outside the Smithsonian Institution. Managed by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, the program assists in capturing the research output of Smithsonian scholars and making it available to Institutional management 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 and the content of the Smithsonian Digital Repository is a sub-set of the items listed in the Smithsonian Research Bibliography. The electronic publications contained in the Digital Repository are accompanied and identified by a set of data elements (author, title, publication date, etc.) which are exported from the Research Bibliography.

Some Smithsonian units are required to contribute citations of staff publications to the Research Bibliography. The Bibliography collected approximately 1600 citations from 15 Smithsonian units during 2008. 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.