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How do I research current journal literature on the Internet?By Anneli Meeder - March 17, 2005 Usually, a thorough search for journal references will be done in a large commercial database such as Web of Science (Science Citation Index), GeoRef and others, which are only accessible in some libraries and large companies, and searches can be very costly. There are some alternative journal article search engines that are freely available on the Internet, and I want to highlight the three I find the most useful, Google Scholar, Scirus and Ingenta. All three search engines make it easy to get the journal articles you find by linking directly to the publishers' websites. Here you will in most cases be able to download the article for a fee (usually around US$30.00). Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) Google Scholar was announced with great fanfare recently (late 2004), and is still in its testing phase. Its database of online journal content is still comparatively small, but it is easy to use and you will likely be able to find some references. One of the biggest handicaps of Google Scholar is the omission of all the journals of the largest journal publisher (Elsevier), therefore journal articles that are published in the Journal of Geochemical Exploration or the International Journal of Mineral Processing, for example, are not indexed at all. What it does:
What it does not do:
Scirus (www.scirus.com) Scirus has been online since 2001 and claims to have indexed more than 20 Mio citations, 5.5 Mio of these are available for downloading. It was established by the largest journal publisher Elsevier as a search engine for scientific papers and selected websites (e.g. universities and government agencies). Its coverage of journals is not complete, but far wider than Google Scholar's. I find it very easy to use and I like being able to restrict the search results to journal sources only. What it does:
What it does not do:
Ingenta (www.ingentaconnect.com) Ingenta has been around the longest of the three. It incorporates the Uncover database, a journal contents database that has been compiled since 1988. Ingenta indexes 28.000 journals, and has a total of more than 17 Mio articles. Searches are free, the majority of articles can be ordered directly from the website. Ingenta contains two separate databases with overlapping content ("Electronic content" database and "Fax/Ariel content" database) - make sure to search both to get the best results. What it does:
What it does not do:
Conclusions: For a thorough search, the online databases cannot replace the large commercial databases with their millions of references and far superior search mechanisms. Of the three search engines, Ingenta has the best (most relevant and more complete) search results, but is the most difficult to use. Scirus is doing a very good job at ferreting out relevant websites that even Google cannot find, and has a larger article index than Google Scholar. Google Scholar's strength lies in its ease of use and its ability to find some older citations that may not be online, but falls far behind in its scope. Useful links (on LinksMine): |
