Ten science search engines
Posted by Karen Blakeman on November 14th, 2008
Ten science search engines is actually a list of nine – you are invited to submit suggestions for the tenth via the comments section. The nine are:Scirus, Scitopia.org, Science.gov, ScienceResearch.com, Scitation, WorldWideScience.org, Science Accelerator, TechXtra, and search.optics.org. They all have different coverage and emphasis and none are comprehensive. Which one will work for you depends very much on the subject area. The three I regularly use in this list are Elsevier’s Scirus, TechXtra for engineering (ICBL and Heriot-Watt University) and WorldWideScience.org. Conspicuous by its absence is Google Scholar!
November 14th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Hi, Karen. Thanks so much for alerting those of us interested in science searching to that list. Very helpful!!
November 14th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Hi Hope, Many thanks for the positive feedback. Heriot-Watt do a lot of good stuff in this area so it is worth monitoring their blog “spineless?” at http://hwlibrary.wordpress.com/
November 18th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
I think http://www.nextbio.com belongs on the list because it not only does an excellent job searching through publications, it searches actual clinical results and experimental data.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Hi Lisa,
Many thanks for the alert on Nextbio. Looks very interesting. I like the suggestions it comes up with when I start entering search terms and the tag cloud on the results page. Both are excellent ways of proposing alternative approaches to your search. I’ll have a more in depth look at it once I am back from my travels.
Karen
November 19th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
[...] Many thanks to Karen Blakeman for her recent post on Ten Science Search Engines: [...]
November 20th, 2008 at 4:53 am
[...] wrote another blog article, just today, exploring some of the Ten Science Search Engines discussed in yet another blog article (which I’ll get to in a little bit.) In researching [...]
November 29th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Hi Karen,
Very useful list, thanks for sharing it. I am curious, why did you select the 3 search sites that you did? Why do you prefer science.gov over scitopia, specifically? I always thought scitopia had the best sources. Either way, I am glad you didnt list Google Scholar!
November 30th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Hi Search User,
Thanks for the feedback.
I don’t prefer science.gov over scitopia – I just listed them in the same order as the original posting. Personally, I find science.gov too limited in coverage for the subjects I research. I singled out Scirus, TechXtra and Worldwidescience because they usually provide the best results for the type of information and subject matter that I need at the moment. In another 6 months I might be looking at different topics and industries that will require different databases. “Horses for courses” as the saying goes
February 3rd, 2009 at 11:06 am
[...] TechXtra mentioned in Zen Monthly Newsletter. Posted in News by Roddy MacLeod on the February 3, 2009 Nice to see that TechXtra was mentioned in this month’s Zen Monthly Newsletter (under The results Google can’t find). TechXtra is also mentioned in Karen Blakeman’s Blog. [...]