Google Scholar

The wizards at Google have now come up with a new valuable alternative to searching for scientific information: Google Scholar. This is becoming one of my favorite websites to use for a quick and dirty scientific information search. Almost all scientific databases are included in this search engine and it makes finding articles quite easy. If the information is available freely on the web (fairly rare) then you can get free access to the full text or PDFs of articles.

However, even if you cannot access the full text, you always get the authors, title and journal name and typically can read the abstract as well. So even if you cannot read the full text, you have all the information you need to retrieve it elsewhere and well written abstracts will let you know if the article contains what you need, saving valuable time.

Instant Citations!

Another powerful feature of Google Scholar is that it will typically list most, if not all, of the articles that cite a partictular article. So not only can you get all the information you need to retrieve an article, you can also see how popular that article is (an indication of its strength) in the literature.

Informational Needs

define:

The query [define:] will provide a definition of the words you enter after it, gathered from various online sources. The definition will be for the entire phrase entered (i.e., it will include all the words in the exact order you typed them).

This operator allows you to use the Google search interface as a dictionary.

Query modifiers

site:

If you include [site:] in your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, [help site:www.google.com] will find pages about help within www.google.com. [help site:com] will find pages about help within .com urls. Note there can be no space between the "site:" and the domain. This functionality is also available through Advanced Search page, under Advanced Web Search > Domains.

Ever get tired of those “search engine unavailable” messages? This operator allows you to use the Google search interface as a website-specific search engine. Be forewarned: The results output is typically less organized, and more difficult to review, than the output from the website’s search engine.