How do you perform your literature search? When you work on a project, and need to familiarize yourself/acknowledge all the previous papers, “to the best of your knowledge” all of them, reporting same or similar stuff, what do you do? I am working in the biomedical field. The first thing I so, I always go to SciFinder, put in a name of compound I need to look for, or the structure, or formulate phrase. What I particularly like about SciFinder is that it enables you to access full text articles with one mouse click, as long as your institution has a subscription to given journal or SciFinder has (there are some like that).
I am not really convinced to using Google Scholar. I guess it just is not “scientific” enough, as it is not a database… Maybe also the form how the results are displayed doesn’t particularly fit me. What I appreciate about it is the fact, that it is linked to my University library system, and checks availability of full text, and (I love it!) if it is not available, it is linked to Interlibrary Loan and after I log in- the order form is filled for me! I just need to click Submit. It can’t get easier than that. That’s why I would use it sometimes.
Now, the one thing I never use is PubMed. I tried. It is just beyond me to understand how to formulate question to get decent response and relevant hits, and how the results are displayed is completely useless for me, and hard to browse.
Anybody has different experience? Are you using another database or service?

Technorati Tags: SciFinder