Search engines

What the web may bring to scholarly communication for free or on subscription...

Many of our licences to online journals and databases are provided through the Swiss Academic Libraries Consortium whose members are the university libraries, the Swiss National Library, the libraries of the ETH.

Some journals let their articles freely accessible after an embargo period however, and you may find articles for free on the web, even if published in a toll access journal, since more and more papers are archived in servers all connected to dedicated search engines.

One version of an article is reserved to subscribers, another is openly accessible to every one.

This page describes some major search tools. We may access some through a subscription (), the others are free ().

---

Links to theses sites are given in the *Search engines* list on top of all the pages.

EZB Elektronik Zeitschrift Bibliothek

About

EZB is a database of on line journals that we subscribed or journals which are freely accessible developed by the Library of the University of Regensburg . More then 450 european libraries are using and provide data to this catalog. EZB can be used from any computer (eg from your home, your lab, the library or anywhere in the world) but access to the full text of articles, when they are subscribed to, is possible only from the university.

Using EZB

In French, English, or in German

Web of Sciences

About

Edited by the Thomson Reuters, the company which also publishes Endnote, Reference Manager, Current Contents, and which computes each year the Impact Factor of your favourite journals.

Web of Sciences is a web interface to a databases which cover over 8,000 international journals in the sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. Coverage is not exhaustive, since journals are selected by Thomson: in the STM field, more then 6'000 titles are indexed. From a reference found in WoS, you can navigate up to citing articles or back in time to cited articles. In the future, WoS should be linked to our full text journals. The full text of some articles can be reach in one click via this button .

Using WoS

Many documents and tutorials are proposed by Thomson: from 10 minutes tutorials to more complete documents.

SciFinder scholar

About

From the American Chemical Society, Scifinder Scholar explores Chemical Abstracts Database: CAPLUS, Structure Database: REGISTRY, Reactions Database: CASREACT and MEDLINE.

Using Scifinder Scholar

See these tutorials from ACS to effectively use SciFinder. SciFinder Scholar offers a variety of pathways to grab data: from traditional textual information to chemical data or references. Like WoS, Scifinder has citations linking. Searching with Scifinder in Google will give you many useful tutorials.

Scifinder Scholar now use the Web to access data and a registration has to be made here.

 

Faculty of 1000

About

From BioMedCentral, F1000 is a signaling service that will highlight and review the most interesting papers published in the biological sciences, based on the recommendations of groups of selected leading researchers. F1000 will not necessarily give you access to the signaled papers, since this is controlled by online subscriptions.

Scientists who composed "The faculties" are select by the publisher and are asked to evaluate and comment on the 2-4 most interesting papers they read each month. More on the evaluation system.

Using F1000

You can browse by domains, you can search in the articles which have been selected. or you can see the top 10 to see the very best papers evaluated in the last month across the whole of Biology, or for individual faculties.

To read an article select [abstract on pubMed] then select the links to the journal. Do not select [order article] unless you want to pay twice (since we already have subscriptions to access the full text).

PubMed

About

PubMed from NCBI is a free web interface to MEDLINE. About 4'000 journals are included. It provides biomedical data without delay since articles are linked directly by the publishers. With PubMed, NCBI offers also Entrez, an integrated tool to search in sequences databases.

Using PubMed

In short, PubMed allows to make complex queries with operators. Things like ((dna [mh] OR human* [ti]) AND Cavalli-Sforza[au]) are allowed, but simpler step by step request can also be made. Saving searches is possible, and these can be run automatically from PubMed from a personal account with MyNCBI. See the help on Pubmed for more information.

Google Scholar

About

Google Scholar provides a simple way to search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books ... Scholar's coverage is growing, and it allows navigating from an article to a cited article. Usefull for finding an article, questionable for citation tracking (and searching in google with "google scholar" "web of science" or "google scholar" scirus, will lead to a lot of interesting information).

Using Google Scholar

 

Scirus

About

Scirus, a science-specific search engine, enables anyone searching for scientific information to chart and pinpoint data, locate university sites and find reports and articles quickly. It was launched by Elsevier Science and is currently free.
With Scirus, you can search defined source such as journals, but you can also search the undefined web if you choose purely technical terms that are specific. It is a particularly good search engine for scientist home pages. Scientist can submit web site here.

Using Scirus

 

Base

About

Base stands for Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. Set from a search result can be filtered by authors, sources...

Using Base

By specific fields, two words in the same field are ANDed.