Scholarly Web Searching: Google Scholar and Scirus.

This article compares the Internet search tools Google Scholar and Scirus. With an initial focus on research articles from publishers participating in the CrossRef project and several collections of online preprints and other major scholarly sites, Google established a new approach to a broad range of scholarly literature. Google Scholar aims to include peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. Basically, Google Scholar includes Web pages that either look like an article or other scholarly document. In 2001, Elsevier launched Scirus as a Web search engine that would search both Elsevier's online journals in ScienceDirect along with selected, science-oriented portions of the Web. Despite all the limitations and problems, both offer some unique reasons to use them beyond just watching their future development. Both of these tools may work better, or at least appear to work better, for the affiliated scholar.