Scirus: For Scientific Information Only

Scirus describes itself as “the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web. With over 440 million scientific items indexed at last count, it 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”. While these numbers dwarf traditional scientific databases, such as Inspec that reports, 13 million abstracts, PubMed lists 21 million, even Scifinder; with its array of databases and types of records, lists a total of about 218 million references.

Scirus employs the standard, Google‐like, single search box on the homepage, but has...