In the world of online scientific research, Web giants Google and Wikipedia may not be ideal places to begin, according to Helen Josephine, head librarian of the Engineering Library. Josephine is trying to spread the word about Scitopia.org, a new federated search engine that gathers its information from more than three million scholarly and government documents.

“The main feature that makes [Scitopia] unique is that it searches a very focused set of documents from professional societies,” Josephine said.

A search by keyword can pull results from any number of the 15 scientific societies that participate with Scitopia. The chronological range for materials searched extends from 1874 to the present.

The remaining content searched by Scitopia includes patents from U.S., Japanese and European patent offices, as well as documents from the U.S. Department of Energy.

“It’s quite an interesting package of information,” Josephine said. “Since it searches across many disciplines at the same time, it helps students find things that are being discovered or talked about in other fields that they might not necessarily think about.”

The librarian noted that because the University is licensed with many of the societies searched through Scitopia, students can avoid the pay-per-view option that arises when viewing certain documents. By using Scitopia via a Stanford I.P. address, access to most documents is unimpeded.

Josephine also said that Stanford was quick in licensing with the professional societies through Scitopia.

“We’re kind of an early adopter of it,” she said. “We’re one of the first schools to really try to roll it out.”

The site, which was launched in June, offers both a simple and advanced search interface. The former provides a single basic search window that searches by keyword, and the latter a choice of multiple search fields such as title, author, abstract and affiliation.

Despite Scitopia’s utility, outside reviews of the site did turn up some shortcomings.

In a review published by The Charleston Advisor last month, Yale University librarian Joseph Murphy gave Scitopia a composite score of 3.25 stars out of a possible five.

“The lack of further Advanced Search options, assumedly stemming from the complexities of federated searching, weakens my satisfaction with the search interface,” Murphy wrote in the review.

He also pointed out that the site omits important scholarly societies, including the American Astronomical Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Mathematical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Overall, however, Murphy remained optimistic.

“Despite the weaknesses mentioned in this [review], it is a tool many institutions will find useful if they do not desire comprehensive searching of the literature,” he said. “The responsiveness of Scitopia’s creators gives reason to believe that it will continue to be improved.”