There is an increasing trend for publishers of major reference works to offer them online. This approach has obvious advantages: articles can be linked to one another, readers can easily search for words or subjects, and information can be updated as a field moves on. The best known of these virtual tomes is probably the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but smaller, more focused publications are also to be found online.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that some of our articles feature links to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences. MITECS, as the online version is known, is a comprehensive reference work containing over 450 articles written by leading researchers on topics ranging from the philosopher René Descartes to neural development. Subscribers can access the full articles but non-subscribers can still read the abstracts and, of particular use, follow the useful links to other web-based resources related to each topic.

The design of the site is attractive and simple, and it is easy to find articles by author or subject area. Each abstract also includes links to other, related articles within MITECS, so that I found myself following a train of articles that began with dyslexia and ended with cultural symbolism. Articles are split into six broad areas: Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Linguistics and Language, Computational Intelligence, and Culture, Cognition and Evolution. So next time you see a link to MITECS at the end of a Nature Reviews Neuroscience article, why not follow it and see where you end up?