I’ve never used Scirus, I briefly used Web of Science during my undergraduate degree. I was a bit put off by the number of steps required before you can perform a search. All the one’s I’ve listed you can enter your simply enter your query into the box, and as you mention they’re free as well. One thing I remember about WoK, that was good, were the useful features for searching for related articles, based on citations.

I’ve been having problems with my RSS feed for a bit. I’m not really sure what’s happening, I regularly get messages from FeedBurner saying that there’s a problem, then later it’s been fixed. I think it might be that my server is returning the feed quite slowly.

I must admit I don’t use PubMed much, maybe because I’m a chemist. From your list I use Google Scholar and have looked at Scintilla, Connotea and Preceedings (my how the Natureplex grows) and they look very interesting. I think these resources will become far more useful as the number of users grows.

You didn’t mention the Web of Knowledge or Scirus. Any thoughts on these? Like all search engines they both have advantages and disadvantages.

For the WoK the biggest drawback is that you have to pay. It also, in my opinion, has less of a biological and a more physical slant than PubMed. But I think it has the best search options of any of the search engines I have used.

Scirus is more like Google scholar than PubMed and can be useful for finding MSc and PhD thesis’s that are not covered by the other engines.

PS your RSS feed from feedburner doesn’t seem to work.

@Ian, Thanks for clarifying how to get RSS from PubMed

* http://www.gopubmed.org/

Search PubMed and get results sorted by GO and MeSH

Run your search, then in the pull-down “Send to” menu beside it select “RSS feed”.

I believe you need to have a “My NCBI” account to take advantage of this.

Google scholar does allow journal specific searches, this can be done in the advanced search section. But you’re right there’s not operator such as “journal:nature”, that you can use in the search box.

I wasn’t aware that PubMed has RSS options, I had a look before writing this post but I couldn’t find it. I like HubMed’s RSS because it’s really easy to set up, and as you say it’s possible to RSS feeds for related articles which is handy.

Thanks for the information about ScienceDirect citation feeds, this is another useful feature for keeping up to date on your favourite papers.

Scientific searches are of two equally important kinds: keyword searches and author name searches.

Whereas Pubmed will return articles published by Bob Smith if you search for B Smith and, conversely, will return articles published by B Smith if you search for Bob Smith, Google Scholar can’t do that. Since different journals have different author naming conventions, this makes Google Scholar almost worthless for finding papers by name, and therefore a poor search engine for scientific papers.

Additionally, Pubmed now has RSS feeds for search queries, and has had “related items” for queries for quite some time. They’ve specifically disabled related items by RSS, though.

Another item of note is that sciencedirect.com now has “Cited By” rss feeds for any article in their database.