Scirus Blends Public Private STM Realms.

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Author: O'Leary, Mick1,2 harmonyrd@yahoo.com

Don't underestimate the power of brand-name recognition. Take the case of two similar search engines, for example. Both cover scholarly and technical content; both cover public Web sites and proprietary, deep Web material; both include free and fee-based items; and both have a variety of search options. One, however, covers much more information and has greatly superior search capabilities and substantially more full text. The other is associated with the biggest name in Web searching.

The former is Scirus, a scientific/technical/medical (STM) search engine from publishing giant Elsevier; the second is Google Scholar. Although Scirus (http://www.scirus.com) has been around longer and is provided by one of the pre-eminent STM publishers, which one do you think is better known? (Hint: Do a Google search.)

It must be frustrating for Elsevier that Google's underpowered, haphazard product (see the Database Review "Google Scholar: What's in It for You?" in the July/August 2005 issue of Information Today) has such a high public profile … not that anyone will feel too sorry for Elsevier, with its own reputation as a greedy monopoly. (In fact, let's not extend sympathy to either company, neither of which suffers from a deficit of self-esteem.)

Scirus and Google Scholar come from two opposite poles of the information world. Google Scholar comes from the general Web search engine realm. As such, it gathers a motley collection of disparate information sources and arranges them for you. If you're not happy with the arrangement, tough.

Scirus comes from a different realm of proprietary online database searching. As such, it works with coherent, discrete content collections and offers a range of highly useful search capabilities. Compared to Scirus, Google Scholar looks ill-planned and unfinished. Not that Scirus is perfect; it has its own shortcomings, most of which come from its implementation of public Web searching. The public Web is a messy place, and you can't spend much time there without getting your hands a little dirty.

You can define Seirus as a means to draw attention and trade to Science-Direct, Elsevier's search service for its large STM journal collection. Science-Direct includes 1,800 Elsevier journals, spanning the entire range of STM research. It is sold as a subscription service and is widely used in academic and technical libraries.

In Scirus, ScienceDirect provides citations and abstracts but no full text; complete articles are available to authenticated subscribers and to anyone on a pay-per-view basis (at a hefty $30 per article). Otherwise, Scirus is free, except for a few other fee-based collections. The Scirus business mode] provides another distribution channel for proprietary Elsevier content and positions Elsevier at the forefront of today's Web-centered publishing paradigm.

Scirus has 16 other STM databases, including MEDLINE and several small discipline-specific collections. All provide free abstracts, with a mixture of free and fee full text. This set of proprietary databases makes Scirus an STM database aggregator like Dialog, Questel · Orbit, and STN International--but only on a very small scale. Scirus is selective; it represents an important but very limited slice of the world's scientific documentation. On the other hand, Dialog Questel · Orbit, and STN International are comprehensive; they provide the major discipline-specific databases--BIOSIS, Chem Abstracts, Compendex MEDLINE, etc.--as well as many others appropriate to their respective missions. Scirus is not in the same category. It is specifically for researchers who want a lot of Elsevier content, with public Web scientific content on the side

Scirus searches a large, impressive, and wide-ranging set of science-oriented, public Web content. This is a genuinely important and useful resource, because there is such an enormous amount of valuable and timely STM information on thousands of .edu, .com, .gov, and .org sites.

This is success far beyond the original purpose of the Internet, which was to allow people in the scientific community to exchange information. Now, with the World Wide Web, a significant portion of the world's scientific research available to everyone. And since most of this is full text on public sites, the is no free vs. fee dilemma. In fact, you can ignore Scirus' fee content and use it solely as a powerful STM Web search engine.

It's powerful but not foolproof. The downside of automated Web searching--as opposed to human cataloging--is lack of discrimination. This means that Scirus pulls in a lot of pages that are out-of-scope or completely inappropriate. Most of this comes from .edu sites, including syllabi, student papers, student organizations, and, worst of all, student blogs. For example, search "girls gone wild" on Scirus and you'll get … well, you can see for yourself. Unexpected and undesired results are an unavoidable byproduct of the dredge method of Web searching (Google Scholar has a similar problem.)

However, you can minimize the dredge effect in Scirus with its numerous search options and limiters, Queries can apply Boolean and phrase searching and can be limited by author, article title, journal title, URL, ISSN, date, and keyword, as well as by database, subject category, file format, and document type. Search results in Scirus are sorted by relevance, based upon both dynamic ranking (the number of links from other pages) and static ranking (the location and frequency of a search term).

Scirus' search interface looks even better when compared to the meager search options on Google Scholar, particularly its lack of sorting. This demonstrates yet again that relevance-ranking search engines like Google are very good at what they do, but you can expect more from a full-featured search interface. Nevertheless, Scirus' interface again places it in a middle position between Web sear engines and the powerful database-specific search interfaces on Dialog, et al.

Scirus made a major announcement last year with its Scirus Reposito Search service, which searches institutional archives and data collections. Partners to date include Caltech, DiVA (a joint program of several Scandinavian universities), the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, a the University of Toronto. Previously, this sort of repository content was unavailable either through public Web search engines or proprietary online sear services. The Scirus program brings a new realm of scientific and technical information into wide public access.

Of course, Scirus is not the only one that is partnering with private know edge institutions, particularly universities, to digitize or index its holdings for public Web access. Similar examples are Yahoo!'s Content Acquisition Program Google's controversial Google Book Search, and Google Scholar, which itself provides access to many knowledge institution collections. All of these effort are breaking down long-standing barriers between proprietary commercial databases, knowledge institution collections, and the public Web.

This is an important and far-reaching trend for scientific and technical researchers, who benefit from the widest possible access to information. But information, once it's let loose, has a way of making itself useful in unexpected ways. Though eventual contributions of Scirus and the others are difficult foresee, they're altogether promising and exciting.

Elsevier, Radarweg 29, Amsterdam 1043 NX, 011-31-20-485-3911; http://www.scirus.com.

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By Mick O'Leary

Mick O'Leary is the director of the library at Frederick, Md., and a principal in The Data Brokers. His e-mail address is harmonyrd@yahoo.com. Send your comments about this column to itletters@infotoday.com.