SciSearch Plus at LANL

The Value of SciSearch

SciSearch at LANL: http://search.lanl.gov/

SciSearch offers selective multidisciplinary coverage

SciSearch attempts to index the most important journals in each scientific discipline.

• Only the most important journals in each field are indexed.

• SciSearch indexes 5,900journals in all sciences.

• Compare with:
  • MEDLINE (4,600 journals in clinical medicine and basic biomedical sciences)
  • BIOSIS Previews (5,000 journals in the biological sciences, plus books that are not indexed in SciSearch)
  • CAS Online/Chemical Abstracts (monitors over 9,000 journals in chemistry and related areas)
  • INSPEC (4,200 journals plus other materials in physics, engineering, and related areas)

SciSearch is particularly strong in chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine.

Coverage is less strong in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and earth sciences.

SciSearch indexes journal literature only.

• Any discipline in which significant research is reported in technical reports or government documents-geology and engineering for example-is less well covered in SciSearch.

Citation searching is the unique value of SciSearch

SciSearch includes all items from the cited references for each paper it indexes.

• Trace the development of an idea.
  • If you have an older paper, use SciSearch to find all later papers that cite it.

• Find methods, techniques, and procedures
  • With the classical paper on a technique or procedure, find later papers using that same procedure if the authors of the later paper cited the original paper.
  • Without citation indexing, it is very difficult to find research that uses a particular procedure.
  • Generally abstracts emphasize results and not methods.

• Find literature not covered in other databases
  • Authors cite any kind of literature and not just journal articles from recent years.
  • For example, use SciSearch to find the paper in which Watson and Crick proposed the double helical structure of DNA.
  • This work was done in the early 1950s so it can't be found in MEDLINE, BIOSIS, or most other indexes.
  • However, that paper is still cited frequently and can be found through SciSearch.

• Find literature on very specific subjects
  • If you have an early paper on an obscure subject or a subject that has generated very little literature use SciSearch to find later papers on the same subject.

Rapid indexing

SciSearch is more up-to-date than most other indexes.

Records usually appear in SciSearch two to three weeks after publication.

For most other databases, it takes three to eight weeks for records to appear in the database.

Weekly alerting service

You can enter a search strategy.

For example, you can search for certain authors, certain words in article titles, or specific journals.

Cited reference searches can also be saved as alerts.

Each week, as new records are added to the database, these will be matched against your search.

If anything matches, you will get a list of citations by email.

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• Table of contents

Michael Newman
Falconer Biology Library
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-5021
mnewman@stanford.edu

Last modified: April, 2003