When searching for scientific information, standard search engines hardly ever suffice, since most interesting scientific information is locked in databases not covered by the ordinary web search engines. The fact that scientific search engines index the full text of scientific articles set them apart from the more classic bibliographies and article indexes. Two comprehensive scientific search engines are available.

Scirus http://www.scirus.com/

A freely available scientific search engine developed and maintained by Elsevier. Apart from searching all bibliographic information of Science Direct (The journal hosting system of Elsevier Scientific) it also searches so called preferred web resources, mostly scientific repositories or freely available bibliographies (Our repository Wageningen Yield is one of those preferred resrouces). Scirus provides an extensive, annotated list of these preferred web resources. Moreover, Scirus indexes the scientific part of the Web, e.g. University Websites or those of research institutes et cetera. One of the beautiful Scirus features is the search refinement options that are offered on the basis of your initial searches.

The main value of Scirus however is contained in the full text indexing of the preferred web resources. See Péter's Digital Reference Shelf for a review.

Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/

Probably the best known scientific search engine. Google Scholar indexes a vast part of the scholarly literature, including peer reviewed articles, preprints, theses, dissertation, books, book chapters, conference proceedings and technical reports. Google Scholar has become popular amongst scientist since the results are ranked on the basis of the number of citations to a given item. However citation counts are far from accurate. Some other drawbacks should be mentioned as well. Google has not divulged its indexing policy, so it is not know what the database entails exactly, and in comprehensiveness tests it has failed quite often. On the plus side are the functionalities that Google Scholar offers for locating copies of articles making use of your universities URL resolver.

Scientific Commons http://en.scientificcommons.org/

An impressive search engine based on the OAI protocol. It indexes 902 repositories from over 50 countries. It has indexed more than 16.8 million items. The fulltext plus metadata of the articles is indexed as well up to a limit of 3 MB. But above all, the search engine is really fast.

WorldWideScience http://worldwidescience.org/

This is a global science gateway—accelerating scientific discovery and progress through a multilateral partnership to enable federated searching of national and international scientific databases

Scitopia http://www.scitopia.org/

Search over 3.5 million documents, plus patents and government data. Twenty One societies spanning 350 years of sci-tech scholarship.

Additional information

Jacso, P. (2008) Google Scholar revisted. Online Information Review 22(1):102-114 http://www.jacso.info/PDFs/jacso-GS-revisited-OIR-2008-32-1.pdf

Jacso, P. (2006) Deflated, inflated and phantom citation counts. Online Information Review, 30(3): 297-309. http://www.jacso.info/PDFs/jacso-deflated-inflated.pdf

Notess, G. (2005), Scholarly web searching: Google Scholar and Scirus. Online, 29(4):39 http://www.infotoday.com/online/jul05/OnTheNet.shtml

home

WG 20080617

 Create your own educational wiki!Support Community Add to Del.ici.ous Add to fUrl Add to SpurlPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS