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RR 2012/271
Scirus: For Scientific Information Only
Elsevier
URL: www.scirus.com/
Last visited April 2012
Gratis
Keywords Electronic media, Information sources, Sciences
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121211251899
Scirus describes itself as "the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web. With over 440 million scientific items indexed at last count, it allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists' homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information". While these numbers dwarf traditional scientific databases, such as Inspec that reports, 13 million abstracts, PubMed lists 21 million, even Scifinder, with its array of databases and types of records, lists a total of about 218 million references.
Scirus employs the standard, Google-like, single search box on the homepage, but has an extensive advanced search page. This includes, a menu driven search page, with only two search boxes and with two modifying drop-down limiting fields. The first on the left hand side is a drop down menu with All of These Words or Any of These Words or an exact phrase search. On the right side of the search boxes, one can limit to eight different particular elements of the document: the complete document (default), article title, journal title, author name, author affiliation, keywords, ISSN, part of URL. The advanced search page links to a search tips guide for further guidance. Boolean searching (AND or +, OR, ANDNOT or -), wildcards, truncation and field code searching are all available.
Searchers can use date limits and limits to information types, including Abstracts, Articles, Books, Company Homepages, Conferences, Patents, Preprints, Scientist Homepages. Limits to formats are available, including.PDF, Word,.html,.ppt, TeX,.ps files. Searchers can also limit to content...