For getting scholarly articles such as conference and journal publications, my university and all universities provide free access to the conference and journal e-indexes of publications. Most of the time, when I'm looking for a paper, I'll naturally go and search for it in there, because not all papers are widely available for free on the web. However (and I'm sure others can attest to this), the publication search sucks! Big time. I enter the exact name of an article, but either the article I'm looking for comes up way down the list of returned results, or the article is not located. However, if I do another different type of search (like modifying the title a bit by deleting some words), then it sometimes works. When I get fed up of not finding the article, I enter the same search in Google, and lone and behold, the pdf link to the article comes up usually in the first 5 results (or I may have to go to Google Scholar).
Don't the publication web sites like IEEE and ACM use Google search to power their results? Apparently not. I just find it a waste of my time having to look through the e-index, when I can just find it in 2 seconds on Google. There are many things that Google publicly cannot index, because they don't have the rights to those publications like IEEE or ACM (unless other people download those articles and then publicly post them on the web). The publishers should make a conscious effort to vastly improve their search to tailor towards the publication domain by using search technology from Google or Yahoo.
What do other academics and researchers do when searching for articles? Do you primarily use Google, Yahoo, Citeulike, publication web sites, Citeseer, or a combination of these?
On Technorati: publication search
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