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About Scirus...

Why Use Scirus?

Pinpointing Scientific Information

How Does Scirus Rank Results?

The Technology Behind Scirus

The Range of Scientific Content Scirus Covers

More About Our Information Sources

About the Name Scirus

Scirus is the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet. Driven by the latest search engine technology, Scirus searches over 450 million science-specific Web pages, enabling you to quickly:

Pinpoint scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data on the Web.
Find the latest reports, peer-reviewed articles, patents, pre prints and journals that other search engines miss.
Offer unique functionalities designed for scientists and researchers.

Scirus has proved so successful at locating science-specific results on the Web that the Search Engine Watch Awards voted Scirus 'Best Specialty Search Engine' in 2001 and 2002 and 'Best Directory or Search Engine Website' WebAward from Web Marketing Association in 2004, 2005 and 2006. More...

Why Use Scirus?

Search engines are all different in the Web sites they cover, and the way they classify these Web sites. Scirus, the search engine for science, focuses only on Web pages containing scientific content.

Searching more than 450 million science-related pages, Scirus helps you quickly locate scientific information on the Web:

Filters out non-scientific sites. For example, if you search on REM, Google finds the rock group - Scirus finds information on sleep, among other things
Finds peer-reviewed articles such as PDF and PostScript files, which are often invisible to other search engines.
Searches the most comprehensive combination of web information, preprint servers, digital archives, repositories and patent and journal databases. Scirus goes deeper than the first two levels of a Web site, thereby revealing much more relevant information.

Pinpointing Scientific Information

Scirus has a wide range of special features to help you pinpoint the scientific information you need. With Scirus, you can:

Select to search in a range of subject areas including health, life, physical and social sciences.
Narrow your search to a particular author, journal or article.
Restrict your results to a specified date range.
Find scientific conferences, abstracts and patents.
Refine, customize and save your searches.

More advanced features are available in the Scirus Advanced Search Menu.

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How Does Scirus Rank Results?

Search results in Scirus are, by default, ranked according to relevance. It is also possible to rank results by date. You can do this by clicking the Rank by date link on the Results Page.

Scirus uses an algorithm to calculate ranking by relevance. This ranking is determined by two basic values:

1.Words - the location and frequency of a search term within a result account for one half of the algorithm. This is known as static ranking.
2.Links - the number of links to a page account for the second half of the algorithm - the more often a page is referred to by other pages, the higher it is ranked. This is known as dynamic ranking. Overall ranking is the weighted sum of the static and dynamic rank values. Scirus does not use metatags, as these are subject to ranking-tweaking by users.

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The Technology Behind Scirus

For more information about the technology behind Scirus, and the advanced functionality Scirus offers, download our white paper.

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The Range of Scientific Content Scirus Covers

Scirus returns results from the whole Web, including access-controlled sites that other search engines don't index. Scirus currently covers over 450 million science-related Web pages, including:

156 million .edu sites
54 million .org sites
9 million .ac.uk sites
52 million .com sites
36 million .gov sites
Over 143 million other relevant STM and University sites from around the world

In addition to Web pages, Scirus indexes the following special sources (the numbers are approximate):

422,000 articles from American Physical Society
453,000 e-prints from ArXiv.org
25,000 full-text articles from BioMed Central
13,000 documents from Caltech Coda
3,000 e-prints from Cogprints
72,000 full-text articles from Crystallography Journals Online
20,000 documents from CURATOR
1.1 million documents from Digital Archives
20,400 documents from DiVa
37,000 full-text articles from Project Euclid
2,600 documents from HKUST Institutional Repository
16,000 documents - of which 12,000 full-text documents - from HKUTO
9,000 full-text documents available from IISc
4,900 full-text documents available from Humboldt Universit��t
242,000 full-text articles from Institute of Physics Publishing
22.1 million patent data from LexisNexis
11,700 full-text articles from Maney Publishing
5,000 full-text documents from MD Consult
413,000 full-text documents from Nature Publishing Group
17.1 million Medline citations via PubMed
63,000 documents from MIT OpenCourseWare
23,900 technical reports from NASA
309,000 full-text theses and dissertations via NDLTD
6,900 documents from Organic Eprints
747 documents from PsyDok
827,000 articles from PubMed Central
221,000 documents from RePEc
60,500 full-text articles from Royal Society Publishing
7.3 million full-text articles from ScienceDirect
402,000 full-text journal articles from Scitation
9,100 articles from SIAM
9,700 documents from University of Toronto T-Space
15,000 full-text documents from WaY

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More About Our Information Sources

American Physical Society
The
American Physical Society (APS) publishes leading international physics research journals, including Physical Review Letters, Reviews of Modern Physics, and the Physical Review series. The Physical Review Online Archive provides access to articles in these journals all the way back to the founding of the Physical Review in 1893.

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arXiv.org e-Print
E-Print
ArXiv is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers. It covers areas such as physics and related disciplines, mathematics, non-linear sciences, and computer science.
The e-prints on E-Print ArXiv are freely accessible for everyone. The E-Print ArXiv data in Scirus are retrieved through the Open Archives Initiative .

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BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an independent online publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes.

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Calltech
The
Caltech Collection of Open Digital Archives (Caltech CODA) is the institutional repository of the California Institute of Technology. It contains the broad spectrum of Caltech research results, such as theses, technical reports, preprints, and self-archived journal articles and conference papers. In addition, the Caltech CODA contains Caltech-related material such as oral histories of faculty and administrators and issues of Engineering and Science (a magazine published by Caltech). As the digital information environment evolves, other kinds of content will be added. The Caltech CODA is managed to be a reliable long-term archive.

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CogPrints
CogPrints is a free, full-text e-print archive of published, peer-reviewed journal postprints plus prepublication unrefereed preprints in the cognitive sciences, covering psychology, behavioral biology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and related disciplines.
CogPrints runs on free Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant e-prints software provided by http://www.eprints.org . The CogPrints data in Scirus are retrieved through the OAI .

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Crystallography Journals Online
Crystallography Journals Online is the electronic journals service from the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). The IUCr publishes seven primary research journals in crystallography, and an eighth covering the technology, instrumentation and uses of synchrotron radiation. The IUCr is a not-for-profit organisation that, in addition to publication of primary research articles in structural science, aims to promote international cooperation and to contribute to the advancement of all aspects of crystallography.

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CURATOR
CURATOR (Chiba University's Repository for Access to Outcomes from Research) captures, preserves and makes publicly available intellectual digital materials from research activities on Chiba University campuses, including peer-reviewed articles, theses, preprints, statistical and experimental data, course materials and software. CURATOR is intended to function as the portal for the outcomes from Chiba University's research activities. The University Library is responsible for building and operating CURATOR under the guidance of the Faculty Committee for Improved Scholarly Information Availability, which is commissioned by the Library Board of Faculty Representatives to systematically promote and arrange disseminative activities by the University.

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Digital Archives

Digital Archives consists of a subset of valuable collections found on the Web from institutional repositories, including preprint (pre-view), postprints (post-review) and reprints (published) of scientific papers, conference papers and posters, theses, reports, books and book chapters, magazines articles, web products, project descriptions, and other published or unpublished documents. The collections currently covered in Digital Archives are: University of Adelaide, National Aerospace Laboratories, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Australian National University, Università di Bologna, University of Calgary, Cornell University, Cranfield University, Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), University of Delaware, Universit��t Dortmund, University of Edinburgh, E-LIS, Erasmus Universiteit, Flinders University, Universiteit Gent, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Glasgow, Göteborg University, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Universiteit Hasselt, Hokkaido University, University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Kanazawa University, Kumamoto University, Kyoto University, Kyushu University, University of Leicester, Universiteit Leiden, University College London, Loughborough University, Lund University, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Malm�� University, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Michigan Deep Blue, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Universidade do Minho, Nagasaki University, Nagoya University, University of New Mexico, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Ohio State University Knowledge Bank, OpenMed@NIC, Open Research Online, University of Oregon Scholars' Bank, Oregon State University, Universidade Federal Do Parana, Pascal Eprints, PhilSci Archive, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, University of Rochester, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, University of Southampton, University of Strathclyde, Texas A&M University, University of Tokyo, Tsukuba University, Waseda University, University of Washington and White Rose Consortium.

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DiVa
DiVA, the Academic Archive Online (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet in Swedish) is a collaborative effort of a number of universities in Scandinavia, which offers both publishing services and technical solutions for local repositories. The DiVA system, originally developed at Uppsala University, Sweden, supports workflows for both electronic publishing and printing. An archive of fulltext documents published at the participating universities has been created and metadata records are disseminated to other information services. In cooperation with the National Library of Sweden long-term preservation is guaranteed as well as access in the long-term. Today it is mainly doctoral theses and undergraduate theses and research reports that are published through DiVA, but it is also possible to publish articles and chapters of books. An increasing number of monographs have been published through DiVA as well.

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Project Euclid
Project Euclid is a user-centered initiative to create an environment for the effective and affordable distribution of serial literature in mathematics and statistics. Project Euclid is designed to address the unique needs of independent and society journals through a collaborative partnership with scholarly publishers, professional societies, and academic libraries. Project Euclid was launched by the Cornell University Library.

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HKUST Institutional Repository
The
HKUST Institutional Repository at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology collects, makes available, and preserves the scholarly output created by the HKUST community in digital format. It contains journal articles (published, post-refereed and pre-refereed versions), conference papers, preprints, theses and dissertations, research and technical reports, working papers, and presentations.

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Hong Kong University Theses Online (HKUTO)

The Hong Kong University Theses Collection holds almost 15,000 titles of theses and dissertations submitted for higher degrees to the University of Hong Kong since 1941. HKUTO now includes over 12,000 full-text electronic theses. The first recorded thesis was dated 1928, though all theses prior to 1941 were lost during the occupation of WWII. HKUTO includes works in the arts, humanities, education and the social, medical and natural sciences. Many of them deal entirely with or focus on subjects relating to Hong Kong. The collection is primarily in English, with some in English and Chinese, and others in Chinese only. Almost all HKU theses are included in HKUTO. Missing ones might be located in HKU.

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Humboldt Universit��t

The Document and Publication Server of Humboldt Universit��t offers the organisational and technical framework to all members of Humboldt Universit��t for publishing scientific documents digitally. In course of this joint services offered by the Computer and Media Services and the University Library scientific documents of high importance are being published on the internet under strict quality control. The digital documents are provided with persistent identifiers and addresses, and are indexed within national and international library catalogues, search engines, and other reference tools. The document and publication server provides protection against distortion by using digital signatures and digital time stamps. Furthermore, long-time preservation of digital publications is guaranteed.

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The Indian Institute of Science (IISc)

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) The Indian Institute of Science owns two repositories ePrints@IISc and etd@IISc which Scirus has combined into one source.

Eprints Archiving Facility: ePrints@IISc
Eprints Archiving Facility: ePrints@IISc The National Centre for Science Information in India has set up an e-prints archiving facility for the IISc research community. This service enables the Institute's community to archive their preprints, post-prints and other scholarly publications. In addition this service assists the Institute researchers in self-archiving and long-term preservation of their scholarly publications, provides easy access to these publications worldwide and improves impact of their research.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archiving Service: etd@IISc
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc)This is the digital repository of Theses and Dissertations of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. This repository has been developed to capture, disseminate and preserve research theses of Indian Institute of Science. This service enables the research community of IISc to self archive their theses and dissertations. It complements the self-archiving service for research publications of IISc, the ePrints@IISc

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Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP)
Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP) is a learned society publisher specialising in physics and related subjects. In addition to current titles, an archive dating back to 1874 is available online at journals.iop.org. Full text access to papers is granted to institutional subscribers but all abstracts are freely available and many IOP journals offer free access to featured articles and letters, and to newly published papers for 30 days. Papers can also be purchased online.

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European Patent Office, Japanese Patent Office and the Patent Cooperation Treaty Office
LexisNexis® is a leader in comprehensive and authoritative legal, news and business information and tailored applications. LexisNexis® is a member of Reed Elsevier Group plc [NYSE: ENL; NYSE: RUK]. Patents in Scirus are obtained via a partnership with LexisNexis and include those from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). Full-text information for recent USPTO, EPO, WIPO's PCT and UKIPO patents is searchable on Scirus, as well as bibliographical information in English for JPO patents. For more in-depth searching through patents, visit LexisNexis.

Patent coverage per patent office: USPTO from 1790 (grants and pregrants), EPO from 1978 (grants and pregrants), WIPO from 1978 (pregrants), UKIPO from 1916 (pregrants) and JPO from 1976 (pregrants).

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Maney
Maney Publishing was founded in 1900, the company has offices in the UK in Leeds and London, and in North America, in Boston. They are especially well-known for their titles in languages and literature, archaeology and architectural history, the decorative arts, and social history. In recent years they have added significant biomedical titles to their list and a major cluster in materials science. Maney currently publishes many society journals, e.g. for the Modern Humanities Research Association (since 1963), Institute of Materials (now Materials, Minerals & Mining, since 2001) and The English Goethe Society since 1947. They also publish over 40 journals under their own imprint. Their on-line journals are hosted by Ingenta Connect, with the majority of back volumes on open access.

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MD Consult
MD Consult brings the leading medical resources together into one integrated online service to help you efficiently find answers to pressing clinical questions and make better treatment decisions. A service of Elsevier, a world leader in health care and medical science publishing, MD Consult operates a family of electronic information resources that meet the clinical content needs of physicians and other health care professionals.

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MIT OCW
MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW), available online at
http://ocw.mit.edu, makes the MIT Faculty's course materials used in the teaching of almost all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. MIT OCW can be considered a large-scale, Web-based publication of educational materials. Educators in the U.S. and the developing world utilize the materials for curriculum development, while students and self-learners around the globe draw upon the materials for self-study or supplementary use. With 915 courses now available, MIT OCW is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge.

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Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group publishes journals and online databases across the life, physical and applied sciences and, most recently, clinical medicine. Content encompasses daily news from award-winning journalists, expert opinion and practical methodology, and high impact research and reviews. Over 30 journals are published in association with prestigious academic societies.

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NASA
Since 1992, NASA has offered their "unclassified, unlimited" technical reports, contractor reports, NASA-authored dissertations and reprints on the web. The subject areas include all engineering and scientific disciplines, but are heavily focused on aerospace research. NASA also makes available the reports of its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, 1917-1958).
The NASA sources currently available through Scirus are:
Langley Technical Reports Server (LTRS)
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Technical Reports Server (NACATRS)
Marshall Technical Reports Server (MTRS)
Global Environmental and Earth Science Information System (GENESIS)
Dryden Technical Reports Server (DTRS)
The NASA data in Scirus are retrieved through the
Open Archives Initiative. All NASA documents are freely accessible for everyone.

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ndl
NDLTD is an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations. It offers the world's largest digital library of theses and dissertations of academic institutions worldwide. It aims to cover all significant graduate research results, in all areas, all nations, and all languages.

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Organic Eprints
The international open access archive
Organic Eprints contains electronic full-text papers, abstracts and bibliographic information related to research in organic agriculture. The Organic Eprints archive was developed in 2002 by the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming (DARCOF). The Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) was the first international partner to join Organic Eprints in 2003. The aim of the Organic Eprints archive is to facilitate further research in organic agriculture.

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PsyDok
PsyDok is a disciplinary Open Access repository for psychological documents. PsyDok is run by Saarland University and State Library (SULB) which also hosts the special subject collection psychology and the virtual library psychology. PsyDok is a free, full-text eprint archive of published, peer-reviewed journal postprints plus prepublications, unrefereed preprints, reports, manuals, grey literature, books, journals, proceedings, dissertations and similar document types.

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Pubmed
MEDLINE® is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains approximately 13 million references since the mid-1960s to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. MEDLINE® is the primary component of PubMed®, provided by NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). NLM Disclaimer.

In addition to MEDLINE citations, retrieval may include other records in PubMed, including approximately 1.7 million pre-1966 OLDMEDLINE® citations, in-process citations, and citations from MEDLINE journals that are out-of-scope for MEDLINE or that precede the date the journal was selected for MEDLINE.

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PubMed Central
PubMed Central is a digital archive of life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). With PubMed Central, NLM is taking the lead in preserving and maintaining unrestricted access to the electronic literature, just as it has done for decades with the printed biomedical literature. PubMed Central aims to fill the role of a world class library in the digital age.

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RePEc
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 44 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available.

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Royal Society Publishing
As the publishing division of the UK���s foremost academy of science,
Royal Society Publishing produces seven peer-reviewed journals and provides access to a rich digital journal archive dating back to 1665. The Royal Society digital journal archive (journals.royalsociety.org) is arguably one of the most comprehensive resources in scientific publishing. It comprises every paper ever published in a Royal Society journal ��� from the very first peer-reviewed paper in Philosophical Transactions in 1665 to the most recent interdisciplinary article in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. While full text access to content is granted only to subscribers, abstracts are freely available and all articles are available to purchase online.

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ScienceDirect
Over a quarter of the world's full text scientific, technical and medical (STM) articles - managed by renowned editors, written by respected authors and read by researchers from around the globe - are available in one place:
ScienceDirect.

Elsevier's extensive and unique full-text collection covers authoritative titles from the core scientific literature including high impact factor titles such as THE LANCET, Cell and Tetrahedron. Over seven-and a half million articles are available online, including Articles in Press which offer rapid access to recently accepted manuscripts.

The critical mass of information available on ScienceDirect is unsurpassed. Coverage includes over 2000 journals published by Elsevier and dynamic linking to journals from approximately 350 STM publishers through CrossRef. An expanding program of online major reference works, handbooks and book series in all fields of science seamlessly interlinks with primary research referenced in journal articles.

ScienceDirect also includes Elsevier's Online Special Issues (https://enduser.elsevier.com).

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Scitation

Scitation is the online hosting service of the American Institute of Physics. In addition to the cross-publisher series, Virtual Journals in Science and Technology, Scitation hosts the e-journals and conference proceedings of AIP, selected English language publications from the Russian Academy of Sciences, and many other physical science and engineering publishers. Institutional or individual subscribers will automatically have access to full text of their subscribed journals via links from Scirus.

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Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) has a comprehensive publishing program in applied and computational mathematics. Each journal has its own home page. To ensure the strongest interactions between mathematics and other scientific and technological communities, it remains the policy of SIAM to:
Advance the application of mathematics and computational science to engineering, industry, science, and society;
Promote research that will lead to effective new mathematical and computational methods and techniques for science, engineering, industry, and society;
Provide media for the exchange of information and ideas among mathematicians, engineers, and scientists.
(
www.siam.org/journals/journals.htm) detailing editorial policy, editorial board with e-mail links, instructions for authors, TEX resources, staff, subscription information, tables of contents, and more.

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T-Space
The
T-Space repository is a partnership between University of Toronto communities and Libraries. T-Space content consists of collections produced, submitted or sponsored by University of Toronto communities, which are managed, preserved and distributed by University of Toronto Libraries through T-Space.

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Way

The Wageningen UR Publications database contains references to all books, articles, dissertations, reports and abstracts authored by Wageningen University staff from 1976 onwards. For documents authored by the staff of the Research Institutes within Wageningen UR, the database contains publications authored from 1995 onwards. The WaY database is updated daily.

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About the Name Scirus

We took the name Scirus from the following passage:

"To the Eleusinians who were warring against Erechtheus, came a man, Scirus by name, who was a seer from Dodona, and who also established at Phalerum the ancient temple of Athena Sciras. After he had fallen in the battle, the Eleusinians buried him near a winter-flowing river and the name of the region and the river is from that of the hero."*

We chose the name Scirus because seers and prophets are said to judge the signs of what is to come. And science is a visionary discipline in which you are continuously working on new ideas and developments. The Scirus search engine will pro-actively support your role as a seer.

*Excerpt from "The Description of Greece" by Pausanias, translated by August A. Imholtz, Jr., CIS Executive Editor

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