Wow! For those of us who use information resources produced by Elsevier on a daily basis, it’s been a bit of a shock to tune into Scopus®, SciTopics® or ScienceDirect® this week to see how different they now look. (Or as a corny analogy, that figurative, proverbial 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner of the room has decided to move house in September 2010.)
On Monday, Aug 30 2010, Elsevier announced their plans to combine and morph these sites into one platform named SciVerse Hub®. Read their press release here. First, I wanted to provide some definitions from the company as to which resources will be combined by this single search engine:
In plain terms, SciVerse Hub is an entry point for library users to simultaneously search the contents of:
- Scopus (a subscription database indexing 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers including coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical and social sciences literature)
- Science Direct (a subscription access point for searching 10 million articles from over 2,500 journals and 6,000+ e-books, reference works, book series and handbooks issued by Elsevier)
- SciTopics.org (a free online expert-generated knowledge sharing service for the global research community)
Scirus.org® is a scientific search engine (created and maintained by Elsevier). Scirus currently indexes 38 million websites found on open-access and mostly educational, scientific or government sites, incorporating what librarians refer to as grey literature. Scirus will search these sources separately and bring back a sorted list of retrievals (with duplicate citations removed) to the SciVerse Hub site.
(Note: When I teach a Google Scholar class, considerable time is spent comparing along with the class participants why retrievals using Scirus.org to search for scientific information tend to produce “better” results than G–gle Scholar. Time well-spent, IMHO.)
Following are two screenshots from the SciVerse site:
And this page:
Note that the capability of searching each individual resource separately has been retained.
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An informational video on SciVerse is well worth watching (and short at 3.5 minutes in length)… link to it here. Another helpful reference resource: an 8-page training handout for using the new site which can be downloaded here.
In promotional materials, Elsevier refers to SciVerse as a “new knowledge ecosystem“. Their information products are integral to the daily work of clinical, health science and scientific research library users worldwide. Here’s hoping this migration runs seamlessly (as in: invisibly and glitch-free).
MD-Consult
EBM and Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC 
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