literature search

A simple way to find resources published by universities or academic institutions is to use the Google search. The site parameter can be used to restrict the search to the academic domain, if such a domain is defined in the country you are interested in. Unfortunately not all countries do have an academic top level domain. Canada or Germany for example do not have such a top level domain.

Google image search has been great. Now it is possible to search the LIFE Photo Archive for their photos, many of them still unpublished. There are two ways to do so:

War Google Scholar bisher schon immer sehr geeignet, um wissenschaftliche Literatur zu einem Thema zu finden, so ist es jetzt noch besser geworden. In der Vergangenheit mussten immer die gefundenen Quellen nacheinander angeklickt werden. Leider waren dann aber viele der angeklickten Quellen nicht unmittelbar zugängig und machten daher eher den Mund wässrig, löschten aber nicht den Durst.

Scirus - for scientific information This is a quote from their site: "Scirus is the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web.

Google did change its advanced search window. They made it a lot easier to use and it looks now much more simplified.  Some search options are minimized and can be expanded if necessary. Well done. Take a look here: Google Advanced Search .




Lets hope the German version will be available soon.

Great advice in starpaths "My web 2.0 collection" blog.

If you want to search for a book, paper, file and your are using Google, just type:

allinurl: +(rar|chm|zip|pdf|tgz) TheTitle

Ever wanted to be notified, if a free full text article of your research interest is newly available in the National Library of Medicine (NLM)? Well, the NLM offers to create your own RSS feeds out of your customized searches. Here are easy step by step instructions on how to do that. Click on any image to enlarge it:

1. Go to PubMed and build your search to give you the best possible results. Perform your search.

Thanks to OCR (optical character recognition) technologies Google now indexes and makes available to text searches pdf-documents, that have originally been scanned. While these documents in the past appeared to be images with their content (text) hidden in the image, Google now converts them to html text and indexes their content. These are great news for everyone searching for articles in old scanned journals.
See: Official Google Blog: A picture of a thousand words?