Are you interested in contributing to HLWIKI International – hlwiki.ca? contact:
dean.giustini@ubc.ca
To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the A-Z index.
Last Update
12 June 2013
Introduction
See also Data science portal | Discovery Tools vs. Google | Google scholar | Information technology topics | Open access | Open data | Research Portal for Academic Librarians
Open search refers to websites and search engines that are openly-accessible and free-to-use for the purposes of searching across the web. Although open searching is not defined, it can be thought of as any tool or search interface/website that makes it possible to search freely and openly on the web. Typically, these search tools do a very superficial search over the top layer of the web. For academic papers, there are several ways the open web can be searched. For example: there are two major tools used in the sciences and medicine, first, Google scholar and second, Scirus. In addition, proprietary databases such as EBSCO and OvidSP are widely used. Some content can also be found in tools such as ERIC and of course the free interface to Medline, PubMed. Is there one all-purpose search engine to search all freely-available literature? No, not on the open web or in a subscription-based database. Needless to say, this causes a major problem in cumulating the scholarly literature. How do academic librarians plan to deal with this problem? A good first step is to acquaint yourself with the range of open resources in searching listed below.
Sixty (60+) Open Search Tools
4 stars denotes Top Ten (10) Repositories of information. Starred sites are great places to begin your research.'
Get at the grey literature in the deep web
- ACM Digital Library Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) provides the computing field's premier digital library
- Archive of European Integration (AEI) archive for research materials on the topic of European integration and unification
- AgEcon distributes reports of research in agricultural economics
- Agricola agriculture and allied disciplines
- Analytical Sciences Digital Library (ASDL) peer-reviewed web-based discovery materials in the analytical sciences
- Arctic Health (NLM) links to full-text journal articles, reports, newspapers, conference proceedings, grey literature
- arXiv physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics
- Astrophysics Data System (ADS) 8.6 million records in astronomy and astrophysics, physics
- BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine search engine for academic open access web resources
- Canadian Association of Research Libraries / Association des bibliothèques de recherche Open Archives Metadata Harvester
- Canadian Nursing Index comprehensive web guide to Canadian nursing resources
- Canary Database @ Yale Animals as Sentinels of Human Environmental Health Hazards
- ChemXSeer http://chemxseer.ist.psu.edu/ environmental chemistry
- Circumpolar Health Bibliographic Database
- CiteBase currently an experimental demonstration
- Citeseerx computer and information science
- ClinicalTrials.gov clinical trials conducted in the United States and around the world
- CogPrints self-archived papers in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and computer science
- Directory of open access journals (DOAJ)
- Discover Ed @ Creative Commons
- Drug Industry Document Archive (DIDA)
- Ejournals.Org
- E-LIS preprints, postprints, documents in library and information science
- Entrez Life sciences search engine meta-search tool
- ERIC Education Search education research
- FUSE business research engine 728 open-access business ejournals, and open research texts
- Google Book Search
- Google scholar largest open tool searching across academic disciplines
- GoPubMed knowledge-based search engine for biomedical texts
- HealthEvidence at McMaster University
- HighWire Press Repository of Free Full-Text Life Science Articles
- IngentaConnect a range of items across academic disciplines
- JURN curated academic search-engine, indexing 3,674 free ejournals in the arts & humanities
- LactMed peer-reviewed database of drugs to which breastfeeding mothers may be exposed
- Lalisio literature (Q-Sensei) arXiv, PubMedCentral & IngentaConnect
- LibSearch federated search engine harvesting 146 digital libraries & providing access to 1996105 documents
- Mendeley social bibliography tool that can be used to search for papers
- Native Health Database HSLIC Native American Health Information Services
- OAIster Worldcat open access and institutional repository meta-search tool
- OpenGrey Repository http://www.opengrey.eu/
- OpenJGate 7742 Open Access Journals (4635 Peer-Reviewed)
- OpenSIGLE reports and grey literature (GL) produced in Europe until 2005
- OpenThesis.org free repository of theses, dissertations, and other academic documents
- Organic Eprints papers related to research in organic agriculture
- PhilPapers directory of philosophy articles and books by academics
- Policy Archive digital archive of global, non-partisan public policy research
- POPLINE reproductive health literature 1970-present (selected citations back to 1886)
- Project Gutenberg e-books in the public domain
- PubMed biomedicine and allied fields
- PubMedCentral open access repository in biomedicine
- PubMedCentral Canada
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics RePEC collaborative effort to enhance research in economics
- Science Commons data trapped, locked up by contracts or lost in databases is meant to be in the 'science commons'
- ScienceDirect 10 million+ articles across science and humanities
- Scirus science, Elsevier content, PubMed
- Scitopia science-technology, plus patents and government data
- Scopus 435 million scientific web pages; 23 million patents
- SumSearch evidence-based meta-search tool, U.S.
- Scienceroll personalized medical metasearch engine
- Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
- Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database - 650,000 records of published research
- TRIP Database evidence-based meta-search tool, U.K. content
- WolframAlpha Computational Knowledge Engine curated data and millions of lines of algorithms #WorldCat - network of library content, acting as a search tool and index to articles and monographs in libraries worldwide
- Yovisto Video access to academic video by providing granular, time-dependent metadata
Open access journal sites
Open source
"Open access to open search in medicine? tools, issues and possible solutions"
- open search gets to the idea of being able to search academic literature without barriers
- naturally, there are many 'shades' of open ...(see shades of Open Access)
- even the least open content locked in the deep web may be findable using open search tools
- see related shades of Grey literature
- metaphors: open sesame; key unlocking door; freedom; liberation; entry
- findability is a problem in a web universe of one-trillion pages, searchable by keyword-only
- metaphors: fragmentation; million little pieces; everything is miscellaneous
- search is defining activity of web; search is not comparable to find
Issues
How will health librarians find materials on the web in the future? In the excitement of open access to research materials in biomedicine - due to open access journals, for example - health librarians should devote some intellectual energy to examining how articles will be found in the evolving scholarly search space. Do we plan to rely on Google scholar? Will commercial databases like OvidSP and EBSCO offer federated or meta-search options to search beyond their silos? How will we locate scholarly materials in institutional repositories worldwide? Will we expect users to engage in repetitive searching to find these materials? There has been some early discourse around the principles of web 3.0, and its role in improving findability in this uncertain OA universe - what kind of potential does the semantic web offer to academic librarians? Perhaps some as-of-yet unannounced academic search tool is in development at Yahoo to compete against Google scholar?
Background
When first released in late 2004, Google scholar caused a stir in academic circles as the first open search tool dedicated to searching the web's scholarly literature. The idea was so appealing, in fact, that the software giant Microsoft launched its own competitor a few short years later, in 2006, called Windows Live Academic Search. Academic search never caught on with the same excitement or approval of the Google brand despite offering a useful functional option for searchers. By 2008, due to less than stellar performance, Microsoft announced it would retire Academic Search, opting out of its book digitization project as well. For its part, GS has remained sui generis in the academic search space. Its primary impact seems to reside in its simple interface, cited by searching and offering access to content that might otherwise not be found. Some critics charge that Scholar has not improved much since its launch in 2004, and web statistics suggest its popularity may be dropping off with time. For many searchers, even in academia, Mother Google - with its ease-of-use, unprecedented reputation and speed - is a worthy alternative. However, for many librarians and scholars, GS is indispensable for finding grey literature and Open Access material.
What is needed for open search in medicine?
-
See also NNLM Super Searcher: Enhancing Your Online Search Super Powers
References
