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The Catalyst: The Swain Library Newsletter

January 1997

Science Citation Index on the Web

Science Citation Index on the Web

I am very pleased to announce that SciSearch is now available on the web.

SciSearch is a multidisciplinary index to the literature of science, technology, and biomedicine that is prepared by the Institute for Scientific Information. Stanford has access to SciSearch data covering 1985 to the present via the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Updated weekly, SciSearch contains access to all records published in Science Citation Index (3,300 journals) and additional records from the Current Contents Series of publications (1,900 journals) that are not included in the print version of Science Citation Index. SciSearch records from January 1991 to present include abstracts.

SciSearch has some important and distinctive features:

Cited reference searching is possible: Each item in a bibliography is called a cited reference. Cited reference searching allows you to use a paper that you know about to identify more recently published papers that cite this earlier article.
Cover-to-cover indexing is done: Most indexes such as Biosis, Chemical Abstracts Online, Ei/Compendex, Inspec, Medline, etc. do not include items such as letters to the editor, news items, book reviews, editorials, etc. that are picked up by SciSearch.

Because SciSearch covers a breadth of disciplines, it covers fewer titles for each subject area than are present in more subject-specific indexes. For example, SciSearch indexes 5,200 titles whereas Chemical Abstracts indexes more than 8,000 titles in chemistry and chemical engineering. However, SciSearch tries to cover the core journals in each field. It does a good job at this for most disciplines, but can be weak in some such as earth sciences, computer science, and mathematics.

Note: The citation index has significantly broader coverage than the 5,200 titles indexed because cited items can include dissertations, books, book chapters, and any journal.

In addition to being able to do searches on demand, users may also set up current awareness searches or "Alerts" to be notified when new items of interest are published. The Alerts service is limited to users whose email addresses end with "stanford.edu."

Run weekly, two types of Alerts are available:

General Alert: Search on authors, titles, keywords, abstracts, sources,institutions, and other topics.
Cited Alert: Search on a specific paper or author to see who has cited that paper or author.

Tagged display formats for importing search results into a database management system will be available from LANL in March, 1997.

For more information, contact Grace Baysinger (graceb@stanford.edu, 5-1039).

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Grace Baysinger
Head Librarian & Bibliographer, Swain Library of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering
URL: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/index.html
Head, Science and Engineering Libraries Resource Group