PubScience Coverage

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Given the discussion on various e-lists about the closure of PubScience,
I'm forarding with permission this message from David Goodman, who serves
as an advisor to Scirus.  He describes its coverage.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 16:08:52 -0500 (EST)
From: David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
To: Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>
Subject: Re: Scirus

According to my experimentation and their help pages, Scirus certainly
does search non-ScienceDirect content. It seems to work as follows:

1. There are two choices, search the web, or search journals (or search
both together)

2. If you choose to search journals, the
default is to search all of the following:
  Beilstein on ChemWeb
  BioMedCentral
  Ideal
  ScienceDirect
  Medline on BioMedNet

You can choose any specific one or more of the group.
BioMedCentral is not an Elsevier product,
and the Medline version used includes all the journals on Medline.

3. If you choose the web, the default is to search
  Chemistry Preprint Server
  CogPrints
  E-print ArXiv
  Mathematics Preprint Server
  NASA
  Neuroscion
  US Patent Office

AND
	university Web sites
	society homepages
	scientists' homepages
	news pages
	conference information
	patent information
	e-prints/preprints
	company homepages
	product information

but you can choose to search any or all of them.

4. In my experience, the journal search works fairly well, and the web
search also works fairly well, if you use only the defined sources. It is
reasonably usable on the undefined web if you choose purely technical
terms and are quite specific. It is a particularly good search engine for
scientist home pages.

5. The default display is by relevance. Among journal sources, Elsevier
banners seem to appear often, perhaps because Scirus uses the BioMedNet
banner for Medline but non ScienceDirect sources. You can eliminate the
ScienceDirect sources in the advanced search mode, by using the ANDNOT
operator with "science-direct" in the url field.  (You will still get some
Elsevier titles, for early years that are not yet on ScienceDirect).

Note that I am a member of their library advisory board, but am answering
just as an individual, with information based only on the actual site. It
is a free site, and everyone can try it themselves: www.scirus.com

Dr. David Goodman
Princeton University Library
and
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
dgoodman@princeton.edu