Our friends at Elsevier have created a search engine called Scirus (www.scirus.com) that focuses on scientific content on the Internet, and many researchers find it useful. In addition to web sites, it also searches bibliographic databases, such as PubMed. The only full text journal articles it searches are those that are either open access (e.g., BioMed Central) or those from ScienceDirect. (For a complete description of what it searches, see http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/aboutus/#range).
Some researchers think it is searching ALL full text articles, so that is a misconception we should be aware of. However, the advantage of Scirus is that by searching the full text, it's a good place to go to look for specific methods, techniques, named products (e.g., devices) and company names. These terms are usually not in the citations or abstracts, but are in the Methods sections of articles. Another database that permits similar full text searching is Journals@Ovid Full Text, which includes about 600 journals.
Posted by biomedref at May 14, 2004 02:34 PM