There are several very good science/technology search engines. These will usually give much more focussed search results than Google.
Scirus
Scirus searches over 450 million scientific items, and allows researchers to search for not only journal content but also scientists’ homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information.
Scitopia.org
Scitopia.org is a free federated vertical search service which retrieves content provided by its twenty-one partner scholarly societies (Acoustical Society of America, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, American Society of Civil Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Vacuum Society, Audio Engineering Society, The Electrochemical Society, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Institute of Physics Publishing, International Union of Crystallography, Optical Society of America , Professional Engineering Publishing, The Royal Society, Society of Automotive Engineers, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, SPIE, and The Society for Information Display).
Science.gov
A new version has just been launched. Science.gov is a free, integrated single-search gateway to reliable science and technology information from 17 organizations within 13 federal science agencies.
Science Research
A free search engine allowing access to numerous scientific journals and public science databases.
Scitation
Searches more than one million documents from scholarly journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and other special publications from prestigious scientific societies and technical publishers. In addition, through Scitation, members of Heriot-Watt University can access the full text of several journals published by the American Institute of Physics and other learned societies, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Optical Society of America.
WorldWideScience.org
WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway connecting you to national and international scientific databases and portals.
Science Accelerator
Science Accelerator searches science, including R&D results, project descriptions, accomplishments, and more, via resources made available by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), U.S. Department of Energy.
TechXtra
A free service provided by Heriot-Watt University which can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, thesis & dissertations, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing.
search.optics.org
A much more specific search engine. This one is a search tool that only returns results from websites that have been selected for their optics content
Yes…well…that’s only nine science search engines! Tell me what you think should be the tenth, in a Comment to this post.
More searchable databases are listed on our Databases and other electronic resources pages.
Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
25 October 2008 at 6:09 am |
[...] Ten science search engines « spineless? (tags: technolibrarian:science technolibrarian:web_tools search_engine) [...]
14 November 2008 at 8:17 am |
[...] Overall, RefSeek does a reasonable job of limiting your search to more serious scientific and academic information but there are far too many omissions for it to be reliably used on its own. There are several other science search engines that I would recommend you investigate and use along side of RefSeek: see Ten Science Search Engines at http://hwlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/science-search-engines/ [...]
14 November 2008 at 8:57 am |
[...] Ten science search engines is actually a list of nine – you are invited to submit suggestions for the tenth via the comments section. The nine are:Scirus, Scitopia.org, Science.gov, ScienceResearch.com, Scitation, WorldWideScience.org, Science Accelerator, TechXtra, and search.optics.org. They all have different coverage and emphasis and none are comprehensive. Which one will work for you depends very much on the subject area. The three I regularly use in this list are Elsevier’s Scirus, TechXtra for engineering (ICBL and Heriot-Watt University) and WorldWideScience.org. Conspicuous by its absence is Google Scholar! [...]
14 November 2008 at 1:46 pm |
What a useful list! Thank you so much for providing it. This list is a real public service.
20 November 2008 at 4:54 am |
[...] in which she tells her readers of a list of nine (readers pick the tenth) science search engines. The list appears in the “spineless” blog and was compiled by Roddy MacLeod, Senior Subject [...]
8 January 2009 at 5:51 am |
thank you very much
9 January 2009 at 4:14 pm |
Impressive list but non of the engines is semantic – a must in our times (IMHO). Allow me to point out GoPubMed.org, a semantic knowledge based search engine for the life sciences. It’s also free and open. GoPubMed goes beyond clustering and uses ontologies as background knowledge. So the wisdom of many brains is used in a wiki-like approach to sort search results according to a scientific “table of content”. Time savings while search of 90 % and more can be archived whilst searching for scientifically correct facts. Could it be one of the 10?
13 February 2009 at 11:32 pm |
10th, should be VADLO.com
19 February 2009 at 2:36 pm |
Or even novo|seek http://www.novoseek.com/
4 March 2009 at 3:00 pm |
[...] Use specialist search tools for subject areas and scientific disciplines. Some are listed at http://hwlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/science-search-engines/ [...]
1 June 2009 at 10:05 am |
[...] we’ve done a little publicity: Some time ago, TechXtra was featured in my post Ten science search engines, on spineless? the Heriot-Watt University Library blog. We’ve had a good response to this [...]
4 June 2009 at 7:49 am |
[...] one of the Ten science search engines I mentioned a while back on this blog, has recently been [...]
22 June 2009 at 3:26 pm |
Great post, make more
29 June 2009 at 12:47 pm |
One of the search engines mentioned above – ScienceResearch.com – has been relaunched. See http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Deep-Web-Tech-Relaunches-ScienceResearchcom-54675.asp for more details.
23 July 2009 at 9:34 pm |
Excellent resources! If I had to add something, I would mention that patents are an excellent source of technical information, if you can stand to read them (they’re all written in legalese, of course). The downside is that they are generally not published until 18 months after they are submitted, so currency is a problem. Check out Google Patents for a free patent search engine.
By the way, I work for Intellogist.com, where we offer a Resource Finder tool that contains a massive collection of online scientific and technical databases and resources broken down by subject matter. The tool is available at http://www.intellogist.com/wiki/Resource:Resource_Finder. Thanks for the referral on search.optics.org, we’ll definitely add it in. And thanks for the great post!
4 August 2009 at 6:20 pm |
Keep the good posts comming:)
16 August 2009 at 12:58 pm |
IEEEXPLORE – is a useful source for Engineering
17 September 2009 at 8:21 am |
[...] science search engines – update It’s almost exactly a year since the post Ten Science Search Engines appeared on this blog. I can tell from the stats that that post has been amazingly popular, so [...]