Is there a better alternative for searching all scientific articles?
- Hit up Google Books / Amazon for SIP (Statistically improbable phrases) related to your topic. These are useful.
- Add a bunch of +[Author name] keywords into scholar in order to get papers that cite certain people. Eventually you build up a standard list of authors that you want to find papers citing (yes, I know, this can be overly narrow, but it's effective).
- As mentioned elsewhere, use Citeseer.
- Its much easier to navigate a reference graph than to search cold. So find papers you think are excellent, and then serach everyone who cites them, all other work by referenced and citing authors, and so on.
- Use arXiv. You can set up RSS feeds for certain keywords, and search them. This is low-SNR but yields some gems.
- Most importantly: Don't search! Ask other people what's worth reading and what's good, in your group/lab/friends.
1) A better search interface and reference manager. If you are on OSX, Papers by Mekentosj is a fantastic option. 2) A citation search engine aggregator specific to your field. Something like Web of Science/knowledge is one of the best for my field, but I need to go via a Uni/large organisation as it's waaaay outside my price range.
Site note: In this day and age, these aggregators are a complete and utter racket. Unfortunately it's the way things are while academia finds a lingua franca other than number and status of "peer reviewed" journals for its funding orientated core business model.
I don't know how it rates for other fields though.
It seems great if i'm trying to locate a specific article or ref by title or author ...and has in fact helped me at least get the exact citation for very obscure dissertations, conference papers, etc. But it's proved so helpful for search by keyword/topic.
During studies I used EBSCO www.search.ebscohost.com , there is almost every field, from Astronautics to Zoology :-), but access to some resources is limited.
For searching papers, look at CiteULike
Google with site:arxiv.org