About SciSearch® at LANL  

Access to published scientific literature in the form of indexes, abstracts and alert services remains vital to keep pace with developing multidisciplinary research. To achieve our goal of delivering information to the desktop via the Web, in 1994-95 the Research Library in collaboration with the Advanced Databases Group at Los Alamos initiated a development project to provide SciSearch® at LANL.

SciSearch® was chosen as a first effort due to the comprehensive range of scientific coverage and the corresponding relevance to the interdisciplinary research interests of the Laboratory. SciSearch® at LANL is the application developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory to search SciSearch®, an electronic database based upon Science Citation Index, an international, multidisciplinary index to the journal literature of science and technology produced by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Updated weekly, SciSearch® covers 5,200 worldwide journals from 100 scientific disciplines and includes significant items such as articles, letters, editorials, etc., including journals from the Current Contents series of publications. Raw ASCII data was licensed for use from the Institute of Scientific Information and the database was created using Verity's Topic, a full-text retrieval tool, as the database engine with a customized front end called Explorer, which was developed by Los Alamos. The database of over 19 million citations (with abstracts from 1991) was made available covering 1974 through the present. This database grows rapidly with roughly 20,000 new citations weekly.

To keep pace with the explosion of scientific publications, a weekly alerting service has been developed. The SciSearch® at LANL Weekly Alerting Service is an automatic current awareness service that can be used to track tables of contents of favorite journals or subjects of interest. With the exact source capability, users can track articles from favorite journals or subject based alerts can be created. Cited references can also be tracked using the alert service — users can be notified when others cite their papers or they can be notified when an important paper in their field is cited. Users register for the service and then create a customized search strategy that will be matched automatically against each new weekly update and the results sent via email.

Journals to which the Research Library owns or provides electronic access are noted on the full records in SciSearch® at LANL. Following the link Library May Own, the user can determine the holdings at Los Alamos and if an electronic version exists connect directly to the journal.

Users can also mark citations they are interested in downloading to their browser, and then download them all at once in various formats, including those required by popular personal bibliographic management software such as EndNote. Once a group of citations have been downloaded to a user's browser they can be printed, saved to a file, or e-mailed to a colleague.

SciSearch® at LANL -- Some Facts

The SciSearch® at LANL database contains:

• 19+ million citations, spanning 1974 � present, from 5,200 journal titles
• Over 250 million cited references
• 98 million active hyperlinks
• 20,000 new records added weekly
• 3,500 customized alerts with individual profiles
• Over 600,000 links to full-text journal articles

More information: SciSearch at LANL version history and future developments.