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Keywords
Internet, Discipline, Special libraries, Collection management
Abstract
This article reviews Scirus, Elsevier Science's search engine. Scirus is advertised as the world's first scientific search engine. It indexes freely-available Web sites, as well as proprietary content owned by Elsevier and its partners. Scirus was awarded "best specialty search engine" by Search Engine Watch, and may spark a trend whereby other content providers index their content with discipline-specific Web sites.
A baseball writer, we all agree, is the lion of the sportswriting profession. But along about late July or early August, he starts to feel a lot more like one of those little hamsters in a revolving cage (Leonard Koppett).
Search engines have come a long way. It does not seem so long ago that librarians and other information professionals labeled these applications as unintelligent good-for-nothings. Their indexing integrity, the argument went, not to mention relevance to academic scholarship, would never challenge the online catalog and other refereed information sources. Google's emergence in late 1998 ultimately put an end to such unequivocal criticism. As more robust search engines created on the Google model have emerged, it is clear that these agents are quite adept at indexing the Web. Rather than advise abstinence of search engine use, many libraries today provide links to and instructions for using these tools. How times have changed.
Introducing Scirus
The latest arrival to the search engine scene is no less impressive. Scirus <http:// www.scirus.com/>, a specialty search engine developed by Elsevier Science, is designed to index scientific information on the Web, along with content owned by Elsevier and its partners. Such a marriage of freely-available content with proprietary articles is not an original concept (Jasco, 2001). Northern Light pioneered this...