Beyond Google, specialist search engines |
There are other search engines beyond Google, both general search engines and other more interesting and specialised ones, such as Scirus or Scientific Commons which are open access and can prove very useful. There is also an alternative to Wikipedia called Scholarpedia, which is a version of Wikipedia that is revised and maintained by academics from around the world. |
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Scirus is a powerful and wide-ranging search engine for specifically academic and scientific subjects on the web. It searches over 370 million exclusively scientific websites. |
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It uses the latest search engine technology and an algorithm to calculate a hierarchical classification in terms of relevance. Scirus, unlike general search engines, filters information according to academic criteria. |
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Scirus has received a number of awards including a Search Engine Watch award, given to the best search engines, and a Webby Award in the best science website category. |
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Scirus offers another service: SciTopics. It is a free resource for sharing knowledge in the scientific community. It consists of a series of pages written by experts on a single site. It is organised by subject, covering a wide range of scientific, technical and biomedical topics. |
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SciTopics aims to act as the starting point for researchers, providing a general introductory overview into a given subject, while also identifying sources for deeper and wider analysis. Unlike other web services for the scientific community, SciTopics does not focus on any one specific scientific discipline, but is instead open to researchers from all areas of science. |
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Alongside the up-to-date description in each entry, there is also a summary of the contents, bibliographic references provided by the author, a selection of recent articles and those most cited (from the Scopus database), and links to web pages indexed by Scirus with further information. |
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