Scientific Federated Search Sites
I had to locate articles written by a prominent scientist and here are some of the sites that proved useful. You may not know much about science, but a guy who does is probably published. If the subject of your inquires is published, then you may not have the subject-knowledge to evaluate individual articles; however, you can apply evaluation method #2 to determine if the journal is reputable and viewed as a valued source of research data.
Scitopia.org is a federated search portal to the digital libraries of leading science and technology societies worldwide.
Science.gov is a gateway to over 50 million pages of science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results.
WorldWideScience.org is a global science gateway enabling federated searching of national and international scientific databases.
This is a comprehensive federated search site for medical information.
JavaScript
All the above search engines require JavaScript. If you use NoScript with FireFox, you will find it annoying to go through the list of scripts, or select allow this page, to permit the searches to run. I just use IE with security set at medium, as these search sites present very little risk.
Federated Search, The Blog
If you want to learn more about federated search technology check out Sol Lederman’s Federated Search blog, which is sponsored by Deep Web Technologies a major player in this field. Sol wrote a nice FUMSI article about his experience writing this blog.
Thanks for mentioning the Federated Search Blog.
I suggest adding PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez), the online version of Medline, to your list. PubMed is an extensive, freely available database of medical and life science literature. Searchable by keyword in different fields (title, abstract, MeSH terms, etc.), author, defining time limits, type of article, etc. Most references have an abstract. Several references dating back to 6-12 months allow full-text access via a direct hyperlink to the publisher, or via PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/), a repository of freely available full-text articles. Very useful for searches in the biomedical literature.
JF