Scirus

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Introduction

See also Google scholar, Open search and Search engines

What is Scirus?

Scirus - http://www.scirus.com/ is an easy-to-use search tool maintained by Elsevier Science, one of the world's largest scientific publishers. Scirus claims to be "the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web. With over 410 million scientific items indexed, it allows researchers to search for journal content, scientists' homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information." Its content is similar to Science Direct - http://www.sciencedirect.com/ whose abstracts are freely-searchable. Scirus recently added expert reviews called SciTopics to its list of assets.

Wide swath of scientific content

See Scitopic pages. In 2008, Scirus was given a new, streamlined user-interface. The goal is to return results trawled from the entire web, and to include access-controlled sites that other search engines do not crawl. Scirus currently covers more than 450 million science-related pages on the web, including:

• 156 million .edu sites
• 54 million .org sites
• 9 million .ac.uk sites
• 52 million .com sites
• 36 million .gov sites
• Over 143 million other relevant STM and University sites from around the world

Elsevier is to be applauded for listing the sources of information it crawls to build the Scirus index. This is something that Google scholar refuses to do. I am pleased to report that Scirus has a number of library partners.

Special sources (numbers are approximate)

Note the impressive range of content that is included in Scirus, but that a significant majority of the journal content, around 60%, is taken directly from Science Direct, Elsevier's search tool for its 2000+ journals. All of the sources included in Scirus are listed below:

• 422,000 articles from American Physical Society
• 453,000 e-prints from ArXiv.org
• 25,000 full-text articles from BioMed Central
• 13,000 documents from Caltech Coda
• 3,000 e-prints from Cogprints
• 72,000 full-text articles from Crystallography Journals Online
• 20,000 documents from CURATOR
• 1.1 million documents from Digital Archives
• 20,400 documents from DiVa
• 37,000 full-text articles from Project Euclid
• 2,600 documents from HKUST Institutional Repository
• 16,000 documents - of which 12,000 full-text documents - from HKUTO
• 9,000 full-text documents available from IISc
• 4,900 full-text documents available from Humboldt Universität
• 242,000 full-text articles from Institute of Physics Publishing
• 22.1 million patent data from LexisNexis
• 11,700 full-text articles from Maney Publishing
• 5,000 full-text documents from MD Consult
• 413,000 full-text documents from Nature Publishing Group
• 17.1 million Medline citations via PubMed
• 63,000 documents from MIT OpenCourseWare
• 23,900 technical reports from NASA
• 309,000 full-text theses and dissertations via NDLTD
• 6,900 documents from Organic Eprints
• 747 documents from PsyDok
• 827,000 articles from PubMed Central
• 221,000 documents from RePEc
• 60,500 full-text articles from Royal Society Publishing
• 7.3 million full-text articles from ScienceDirect
• 402,000 full-text journal articles from Scitation
• 9,100 articles from SIAM
• 9,700 documents from University of Toronto T-Space
• 15,000 full-text documents from WaY

Canadian context

Some Canadian sources are included in Scirus - but not many. Only University of Toronto's institutional repository TSpace is routinely included in the index. However, there will be considerable Canadian content from all of the sources included above.

How Scirus Got Its Name

Elsevier selected Scirus as the name for its free search engine because seers judge the signs of things to come, and science is a discipline where new ideas are being developed all the time. "The Scirus search engine will pro-actively support your role as a seer."

"To the Eleusinians who were warring against Erechtheus came Scirus who was a seer from Dodona and established the ancient temple of Athena Sciras. After he fell in battle the Eleusinians buried him near a river and the name of the region and river is of the hero."

• Excerpt from "Description of Greece" by Pausanias, translated by August A. Imholtz

References

• Cleveland C, De Angelo L. Scirus. In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment, 2008.
• Connor, E. 2005. Searching for science: a descriptive comparison of CiteSeer, FirstGov for Science, and Scirus. Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries 2(2): 35-47.
• Fitzpatrick, R.B. 2008. Scirus: for scientific information only. Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries 5(3): 275-285.
• Ford L, O'Hara LH. It's all academic: Google Scholar, Scirus and Windows Live Academic Search. Journal of Library Administration. 2008; 46(3/4):43-52.
• Giustini D, Barsky E. A look at Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scirus: comparisons and recommendations, Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association 26 (2005) (3):85–89.
• Tompson, S.R. 2007. Scirus – for scientific information. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship (Winter). http://www.istl.org/07-winter/electronic3.html