Despite all the limitations and problems, both offer some unique reasons to use them beyond just watching their future development. For a quick, broad, multidisciplinary search on a very narrow, specific topic, either Scholar or Scirus can give a good start. For citation verification, both can help find erroneous as well as correct citation information. The Cited By links at Google Scholar can be a useful adjunct to the more comprehensive citation tracking from citation indexes via ISI’s Web of Science (or can function as a partial replacement for those without access). At this point, my main use of both is for finding free Web versions of otherwise inaccessible published articles. I found a number of full-text articles via Google Scholar that are PDFs downloaded from a publisher site and then posted on another site, free to all. Both Scirus and Scholar were also useful for finding author-hosted article copies, preprints, e-prints, and other permutations of the same article.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/03/2005 09:13:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
