WRS -- Scirus

I hope everyone has weathered the storm well. Here's your weekly resource spotlight, only a day late!

Scirus is a web search engine specifically for information in the sciences. It searches the whole web, filtering out sites that are not science related and including open access .pdf journal articles and other files that traditional search engines would miss. Their example -- if you search Google for REM you get mostly hits related to the band. Scirus returns hits related to REM sleep. Scirus indexes over 200 million web pages, as well as documents and full-text articles from PubMed, LexisNexis, Caltech, NASA, MIT OpenCourseWare, ScienceDirect, and other sources.

The advanced search allows you to search by title, journal title, author, author affiliation, and ISSN, in addition to the basic keyword search. It also allows you to limit your results by date range, type of publication, type of file (.html, .pdf, etc.), preferred source (such as PubMed), and general scientific subject area (Biological Sciences, etc.)

Scirus provides an intermediate step between Google and a subscription database search.