Scirus Adds the Humboldt University of Berlin Repository to its Index

Opens Valuable Holdings to the Scientific Community

Scirus, the most comprehensive, science-specific search engine on the web, can now be used to search Humboldt University's Institutional Repository. This addition to Scirus opens up the document and publication servers of this prestigious academic institution to scientific researchers around the globe.

Researchers, librarians and students will now be able to use Scirus to search through a wealth of material stored on the university's document and publication servers. This is facilitated through a specially integrated Scirus repository site search.  

Saskia Van Acker, content manager, Scirus said, "I am happy to be able to expand our German language collection with the content of such as prestigious institute as Humboldt-University. The collaboration with Humboldt University of Berlin has resulted in a high quality index that will be updated on a daily basis."

Prof Peter Schirmbacher, Head of Computer & Media Services at Humboldt University of Berlin said, "Research and lectures generate a multitude of scientific papers, the dissemination of which is not easy to achieve through conventional commercial publishing channels. This so-called 'grey literature' contains valuable knowledge."  He continued, "The inclusion of our institutional repository in Scirus guarantees researchers across the world to systematically and quickly make use of our material. We are happy about this successful co-operation as Scirus enhances science's visibility and facilitates scholarly communication."

The addition of Humboldt University of Berlin's holdings demonstrates Scirus' commitment to be the most focused search engine for scientific information. Scirus' powerful search capabilities offer researchers the ability to broaden their searches beyond the narrow confines of scientific journal content and explore the pre-print and grey literature that is stored on university and institutional repositories, the value and usefulness of which often goes unnoticed by the scientific community at large. Humboldt is the latest in a number of world-class Institutional Repositories that have been indexed by Scirus. Other Institutional Repositories that have been indexed by Scirus include NDLTD and Caltech in the US, The University of Toronto in Canada, Diva in Scandinavia, Wageningen in The Netherlands; and Chiba in Japan.  


About Scirus

Scirus is the most comprehensive, science-focused search engine available on the Internet, supporting over one million researchers,
scientists and students worldwide.  Scirus offers users a unique combination of free Web information and journal content, clearly
branding search results from proprietary sources, assuring users the validity of the content. Web sources searched by Scirus include research institutes, governments, scientific organizations, conferences, scientists' homepages and company homepages worldwide. Optimized for science-related queries, Scirus uses a dictionary with over 1.6 million scientific terms, unique pattern recognition tools and linguistic analysis, to classify the content type and recognize the relevance of each document. Searching both the full-text and metadata of over 350 million scientifically relevant pages, Scirus offers users unique search functionalities such as the ability to search on bibliographical information and specific content types. Scirus is the recipient of numerous International awards, including the Search Engine Watch award for Best Specialty Search Engine and the WebAward for Best Search Engine or Directory.

About Humboldt University of Berlin

Since it s foundation, Humboldt University of Berlin has been a "universitas litterarum" embracing all major scientific disciplinesin the humanities, social and cultural sciences, mathematics and natural sciences, medicine and agricultural sciences. The profile of Humboldt research is reflected in sixteen DFG Collaborative Research Centers  and in thirteen Research Training Groups in which Humboldt University has the co-ordinating function. Humboldt University of Berlin also plays a significant role in the DFG Research Center Matheon . Being aware of the growing need for interdisciplinary research, Humboldt began to set up ad hoc Interdisciplinary Centres  across faculty boundaries, some of which include Collaborative Research Centres.  29 Nobel Price Winners
 who worked at Humboldt University of Berlin have contributed to the international acclaim of its research. More recently, the
university has been given top positions in national and international rankings.

The Humboldt University of Berlin repository consists of more than 4,500 records and the numbers are growing. Of these 4,500 records, there are more than 800 published articles, 1,600 preprint articles, 1800 dissertations, 60 books or book chapters, and 190 course materials.  The records cover a range of languages - the majority of which are in German, followed in descending order by English, French, Latin, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.