Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#1

Post by yread » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 11:47 AM UTC

I've been using google scholar but I'm getting tired of not getting results I want - especially the first results often seem only distantly related to my query. Plus I seem to always get an awful amount of noise - only citations or unreferencable sources.

Is there a better alternative for searching all scientific articles?

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#2

Post by asmega » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 12:27 PM UTC

depends on your field. eg IEEE, ACM for computer science. If you're at uni use the library resources

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#3

Post by ftse » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 12:45 PM UTC

I find a good app helps... Papers for OS X is an excellent interface to repositories such as ArXiv, PubMed etc. There is also an iPhone version which will download articles direct over the air.

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#4

Post by bedris » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 12:52 PM UTC

Papers is a great application for searching multiple article repositories and organizing your collection of journal papers.

http://mekentosj.com/papers/

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#5

Post by peoplerock » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 1:12 PM UTC

I've noticed some of same issues with http://scholar.google.com ...

It seems great if i'm trying to locate a specific article or ref by title or author ...and has in fact helped me at least get the exact citation for very obscure dissertations, conference papers, etc. But it's proved so helpful for search by keyword/topic.

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#6

Post by Maro » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 1:16 PM UTC

http://arxiv.org

Google with site:arxiv.org

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#7

Post by peoplerock » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 1:17 PM UTC

bedris wrote: post #4

Papers is a great application for searching multiple article repositories and organizing your collection of journal papers. http://mekentosj.com/papers/

"Papers" definitely looks worth a test drive (Free for 30 days; then $42/é29), though I'd love to see something web-based, not requiring download to your PC, particularly if you have to do some of your research from within institutions on their PCs/Macs. [ BTW: "papers" won an Apple award, so probably works on Macs as well as PCs. ]

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#8

Post by Locke1689 » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 1:43 PM UTC

asmega wrote: post #2

depends on your field. eg IEEE, ACM for computer science. If you're at uni use the library resources

Yeah definitely acm/IEEE. They also have all their publications online now and do reverse DNS to authenticate so it's all pretty easy. If I don't really have an idea of what I'm searching for then I use google. If I have a good idea but it's very specialized then I'll just walk over to the department and ask some grad student or professor where to go. If I know exactly what I'm looking for then I'll go over to the engineering library and ask someone for help.

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#9

Post by sidmitra » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 2:43 PM UTC

For arranging your personal collection of papers, you might look at Mendeley.

For searching papers, look at CiteULike

Re: Ask HN:What do you use for searching for scientific articles

#10

Post by simon_kun » Sun, Aug 30, 2009, 3:34 PM UTC

Basically, you need 2 things.

1) A better search interface and reference manager. If you are on OSX, Papers by Mekentosj is a fantastic option. 2) A citation search engine aggregator specific to your field. Something like Web of Science/knowledge is one of the best for my field, but I need to go via a Uni/large organisation as it's waaaay outside my price range.

Site note: In this day and age, these aggregators are a complete and utter racket. Unfortunately it's the way things are while academia finds a lingua franca other than number and status of "peer reviewed" journals for its funding orientated core business model.