A group-test of business research engines.

Just a quick test, looking for open free texts. I was testing with the term “intrapreneur”.

* Google Scholar:

Only paywall articles on the first page of results. On the second page, one free PDF (“The impact of the library ‘intrapreneur’ on technology”). On the third page, two free PDFs (“Innovation through intrapreneurship: The road less travelled” and “From employees to intrapreneurs”).

* Microsoft Academic Search (indexing almost all science and tech, in beta):

Three papers, all free full-text PDFs not yet available from other engines — “Skunkwork as a learning methodology : findings from venture development projects in industry”; “Behavioral Consequences of an Entrepreneurial Climate”; and “When do ideas survive in organizations?”. In terms of free content for this search, Microsoft is directly comparable to Google Scholar — three results. And, frankly, noticeably better results.

* Google Books:

The first page of 18 results had “limited preview” options for the likely-looking books: Intrapreneuring in action: a handbook for business innovation; Entrepreneurship and the internationalisation of Asian firms; Strategic entrepreneurship‎; Enterprise and small business: principles, practice and policy; and Creating the Intrapreneur: The Search for Leadership Excellence.

* Biznar.com:

I had to add the search modifers -emeraldinsight -metapress -jstor -elsevier -questia to remove a slew of paywall material.

First page of results were all from either the press-agency Reuters or the popular portal BNET (part of FindArticles.com). Second page results were also all from BNET. Third page results were mostly from Reuters, but did include three articles from BusinessWeek — although clicking through on these merely bounced me to the BusinessWeek front-page, not to the article. There was a sidebar option to filter results by publisher. I chose to filter by Google Scholar, but that returned Google Books and paywall journal results (see the Google Scholar test, above).

* FindArticles.com:

There seemed to be some problem with their site scripts, since all results had the title “$result->getTitle()”. There were three likely results when searching only the free articles. These hits were: “Analysis of strategic management of intrapreneurial venture capital and angel capital investments” (2008) from the International Journal of Strategic Management; “Understanding Corporate Entrepreneurship and Development: A Practitioner View of Organizational Intrapreneurship” (2007) from the Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship; and “Understanding Intrapreneurship: a Process Model for the Logic of Action Used by Intrapreneurs” (2007) from the now seemingly defunct Journal of Business and Entrepreneurship. Not bad, but other results were just press-releases and/or article-spam material from Market Wire; Black Enterprise; Internet Bookwatch; Malaysian Business; and Deseret News.

* BASE:

37 results from academic repositories. But of the first 12 results tested only one had a full-text PDF associated with it, our old friend from Google Scholar “The Impact of the Library ‘Intrapreneur’ on Technology”. One of the results was actually pay-walled and had an associated shopping-cart(!).

* Open J-Gate (searching peer reviewed journal only, and searching for the word “intrapreneur” only):

Zero results. Surprisingly, there were also zero results when searching just the trade journals.

* DOAJ article search:

Zero results.

* Northern Light Business Research Engine (set to “all” recent news search, searching for the word “intrapreneur” only):

Zero results.

* Google News:

Results from articles in the Times of India, the Patriot Ledger, Western News, Financial Chronicle website (India).

* TicTOCS and JournalTOCS:

Zero results.

* FUSE:

All the results below, from one keyword. All are free and full-text. I’ve since optimised to remove a couple of duplicates, a ‘call for papers’, and one Powerpoint.

DSpace@MIT : The Pursuit of Acquisition Intrapreneurs (2002). Massachusetts Institute of Technology report.

DRIVING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN INTERNAL CORPORATE VENTURES … (2003). Proceedings of the 2003 U.S. Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference.

Fostering Innovation and Intrapreneurship in an R&D Organization (1995). Report for the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare dept.

RELEVANCE OF INTRAPRENEURSHIP IN SMB : THE INFLUENCE OF AGENCY CONFLICTS AND INSTITUTIONALIZED PRACTICES (2008). From USASBE 2008 conference proceedings.

Entrepreneurs and Intrapreneurs in Corporations (2006). Vikalpa journal. (although painfully mis-titled with the Chomsky quote “Corporations are essentially fascist and incompatible to democracy …”).

Individual Intentions towards Entrepreneurship vs. Intrapreneurship (2008). Paper from the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurs conference.

Innovation through Intrapreneurship: The Road Less Travelled (2006). Vikalpa journal.

Fostering Intrapreneurship : The new Competitive Edge (2008). Paper from the Conference on Global Competition & Competitiveness of Indian Corporates.

The Impact of Intrapreneurial Programs on Fortune 500 Manufacturing Firms (2000). From the Journal of Industrial Teacher Education.

Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (2009). Harvard Business School Working Papers.

THE STRATEGIC ENTREPRENEURIAL THINKING IMPERATIVE (2007). From the journal Acta Commercii.

THE ENTREPRENEUR AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP: OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS OF THEIR ROLE IN SOCIETY (1998). Proceedings of the International Council for Small Business World Conference.

Since FUSE is a CSE, you can also “force” full-text results using filetype:pdf — although as you can see from the above results, that would remove a couple of useful results.

My 10 most interesting new free search tools in 2009 (apart from JURN and Earworm of course):

1. Journal TOCs.

2. Hathi Trust Digital Library.

3. Microsoft Bing. Google responded by adding the useful filtering options on a sidebar. Google CSE’s add the new Custom Search Element.

4. Basic name authority in Google News results.

5. Various search-engines introduce filters allowing users to filter results for Creative Commons content.

6. Microsoft Academic Search (technology and computing-oriented, beta).

7. SurfClarity : persistent session-to-session URL blocking for your Google search results.

8. Auto-detect and auto-translate Chinese on the web, while keeping page-layouts intact.

9. OutWit Docs and Hub

10. AWOL’s comprehensive 2009 list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies. Not really a tool, but if you point an on-the-fly CSE at it, it becomes a search-engine that includes more content (e.g. contributor profiles, calls for papers) than the article-level indexing available via JURN.

And, of special note for innovation in the display of search results, Spezify. And for innovation in the parsing of “in the wild” citations, FireCite.