What is Scirus?
Scirus is a science search engine dedicated to only searching science-specific content. At the time of this writing, Scirus searches over 250 million science-specific web pages, filtering out those results that are not science related in order for you, the user, to quickly pinpoint what it is that you're looking for.Scirus's results are powered by Fast.Scirus Search Engine Home Page
The Scirus home page is refreshingly uncluttered. It's just you and the search bar. On the top right-hand corner is a direct link to news from New Scientist - it would be nice to have an RSS feed enabled here; I didn't see one at this time. The Basic Search allows you to just type in your query, and you have the immediate options of checking or unchecking the boxes for Journal Sources, Preferred Web Sources, Other Web Sources, or Exact Phrase. Journal Sources, Preferred Web Sources and Other Web Sources are all checked by default, but Exact Phrase is not, most likely because unless you really, really are sure of what you're searching for among all the scientific abstracts, it's best to start out general and gradually narrow your search.Scirus Search Options
You have the Basic Search option which allows you to pop in a query and see what happens, or you can also go Advanced Search or set your Search Preferences.Advanced Search allows you to narrow your results by date, information types (abstracts, articles, books, patents, scientist homepages, etc. Any Information Type is checked by default.), file formats (.pdf files, Word files, etc. Any format is checked by default.), content sources-you can choose to only include Journal Sources (BioMed Central, Medline/PubMed, Project Euclid, etc.) or you can go for Preferred Web Sources (NASA, CogPrints, Patent Offices, etc. All is checked by default.). In addition, you can look at Subject Areas to really narrow your search down from the get-go; this includes Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Engineering, Energy and Technology, Computer Science, and many more. The "All Subject Areas" box is checked by default.
Search Preferences enables you to drive your searches the way you would like them to appear. What this means is you get to choose how many results show up on the page, you get to choose if your search results open in a new browser, you can cluster your results by domain, but the coolest of them all is something called "query rewriting." Now, I'm not the most scientific-minded girl, so this especially caught my eye - Scirus will "automatically rewrite queries to improve results" if you leave this box checked (it's checked by default).
Either of these options (Advanced Search and Search Preferences) will equip you to find what you're looking for without too much of a fuss, but if you need extra help, check out the Search Tips page. Scirus has outlined some of the various search operators that will help you, and there's also a much more detailed explanation of how to use the Advanced Search settings than I've gone into here.
This article about science search engine Scirus is continued on page two.
