To all scientists: is there a good alternative to Google Scholar? A good search engine indexing (most to all) papers published at good conferences and journals?
@snaums not that i know of ...
Wikipedia mostly links good papers under the articles. Scholarpedia is good as well, but way narrower..
And then just bounce from reference/citation to ref/cite...
@snaums A #Searx instance,for example https://searx.spootle.de should work for you.Select "science" as category for your search.If you aren't happy with the results,you can change the sources in the preferences.It's even possible to get anonymized Google Scholar results using Searx.
@nipos Ufff, this is not made for browsing through scientific papers. The results I got didn't even come close to the paper I was probing for.
@snaums I tend to use Searx using the science tab and usually get some good results though a few non-academic links do make it in there from time to time.
@snaums so I'm kinda wondering...how hard could it be to make a web crawler that went through tables of contents and abstracts of journals
@Alyx There are several works (I guess they work that way...), like BASE (Uni Bielefeld) or CiteSeeX. I''m wondering the same, btw.
@snaums if I had any programming ability I'd try to do it, haha
@reclus @switchingsocial@mastodon.at @minkorrekt SciHub is not a search engine.
@snaums To my knowledge no. But I'd also like to find out.
@JigmeDatse@social.datsemultimedia.There actually are. Microsoft Academics is one, BASE (Uni Bielefeld), CiteSeeX (or some name similar xD) is one.
@snaums You may be familiar with Publish or Perish but just in case here the link:
https://harzing.com/resources/publish-or-perish
Also, a while ago I came across this (link below) but I haven't tried it yet so I cannot say more. Seems good though.
@snaums I was looking for dblp which is a seach engine for computer science publications and found this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines
@Nocta DBLP is actually quite good, however is missing one feature, which I'm really wanting - I want the paper referencing the paper I have.
@snaums https://arxiv.org/ is not a full search engine, but it has an excellent index to 1.5M+ e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
Strange no one mentioned this one.
@snaums
In a word: no. There are bits and pieces that others have mentioned, but natural language search is a non-trivial problem Google has built its empire on, and invested untold mountains of funding into researching. While basic web queries can get by with being behind the curve as results cluster (allowing services like DDG to compete), academic literature is just way too intricately structured for some upstart to get close to dethroning google -- at least for now.
@snaums
To be clear, finding specific papers or following citation trails is very doable, but the problem of "find papers on X within context Y" is extremely hard to do as well as Google.
@tga You can start by categorizing conferences. You don't start by parsing english text. But the context of their appearance. References can be extracted, as they are quite standardized (at least in a field).
And there is OpenCitations, which is a fair start actually. But seems to depend heavily on the authors submitting their references.
@snaums
Oh for sure, this problem is infinitely more tractable than it used to be now that basically all publications have some form of structured data. My point was just that, at least when I'm searching for existing research on a subject I'm broaching for the first time, I rely on searching the unstructured portions to familiarize myself with the body of existing research, and that's still a hard problem.
@tga Yeah, there is a lot of keyword-extraction from the full text. This is haaaard.
@snaums Physics and closely related fields: ArXiv holds fully open-access ("preprint", but usually updated to match peer-reviewed version) article sources. For articles+bibliometry+data links, all astronomy/cosmology +some physics/geophysics - the ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ ; for high-energy physics +some cosmology - INSPIRE-HEP: https://inspirehep.net/ ; the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines is a good guide. #bibliometry
@snaums
not quite the same but arixv?