New initiative enables cross-publisher, full-text searches of the latest medical and scholarly research

Citation

(2004), "New initiative enables cross-publisher, full-text searches of the latest medical and scholarly research", The Electronic Library, Vol. 22 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2004.26322eab.015

New initiative enables cross-publisher, full-text searches of the latest medical and scholarly research

New initiative enables cross-publisher, full-text searches of the latest medical and scholarly research

CrossRef has announced a new initiative that enables users to search the full text of high-quality, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, and other resources covering the full spectrum of scholarly research from nine leading publishers. Called CrossRef Search, this new pilot program utilizes the collaborative environment of CrossRef, the reference-linking service for scholarly publishing, and Google search technologies.

“CrossRef is very excited to work with Google on this pilot program. Researchers, scientists and librarians should find CrossRef Search a valuable search tool,” said Ed Pentz, executive director of CrossRef. “Now, researchers and students interested in mining published scholarship have immediate access to targeted, interdisciplinary and cross-publisher search on full text using the powerful and familiar Google technology,” Mr Pentz continued. “CrossRef Search, like CrossRef itself, breaks down barriers between publishers on behalf of research and library communities.”

CrossRef Search is available to all users, free of charge, on the Web sites of participating publishers, and encompasses current journal issues as well as back files. The results are delivered from the regular Google index but filter out everything except the participating publishers’ content, and will link to the content on publishers’ Web sites via DOIs (digital object identifiers) or regular URLs.

CrossRef itself does not host any content or perform searches – CrossRef works behind the scenes with Google to facilitate the crawling of content on publishers’ sites and sets the policies and guidelines governing publisher participation in the initiative. As well as enabling CrossRef Search, the partnership with Google also means that full-text content from the publishers is also referenced by the main Google.com index in its more general searches. Participating publishers, with links to the CrossRef Search pages, are:

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  American Physical Society (http://prola.aps.org/xrs.html);

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  Annual Reviews (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/search/external);

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  Association for Computing Machinery (http://portal.acm.org/xrs.cfm);

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  Blackwell Publishing (http://journals.iucr.org);

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  Institute of Physics Publishing (www.iop.org/EJ/search);

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  International Union of Crystallography (http://journals.iucr.org);

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  Nature Publishing Group (www.nature.com/dynasearch/app/dynasearch.taf);

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  Oxford University Press (http://hmg.oupjournals.org/search); and

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  John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (www3.interscience.wiley.com/crossref.html).

The CrossRef Search pilot will run through 2004 to evaluate functionality and to gather feedback from scientists, scholars and librarians for the purpose of fine-tuning the program. Participating publishers are also investigating how DOIs can be used to improve indexing of content and enable persistent links from search results to the full text of content at publishers’ sites. CrossRef is also in discussion with other search engines.