Finding scientific material on the Internet can sometimes seem like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but if you have the right tools and search in the right places you will find a lot of highly interesting material available for free.
Despite the fact that the original idea of the Internet was to form a network between scientists’ computers it can still be difficult to find relevant information, because the Internet contains incredibly much more information than you need just at the moment.
There are a couple of search engines that only search web sites published by colleges/universities and research institutes.
Scirus
Choose “all web sources” if you want to search for web sites with free scientific resources
Seeks free digital resources in research archives among other places.
Google Scholar (beta)Seeks scientific resources on the web
Live Academic SearchSeeks scientific resources on the web
See also the texts about scientific publishing and free scientific resources in the Research section. The section Database guide discusses the licensed databases libraries pay for, in order to provide access for students and staff.
Access is controlled by BTH’s IP-numbers, but if you are using a computer off campus you can still access the resources by proxy login. These licensed resources are available on the Internet, that is true, but you can not access them freely.
The changing face of the scholarly web
Here you can compare the search engine Google Scholar with the medical reference database Medline:
Eva Norling
2005-06-21
