Scientific publishing. Geoscientists aim to magnify specialized Web searching.

Google Scholar and other academic literature collections now hold hundreds of millions of documents—all searchable with a click of a mouse. Still, finding exactly what you want within a specific scientific field can be a time-consuming chore. That could soon change. Geoscientists are working with computer scientists to build a smarter academic search engine that would help geoscientists find the exact data sets and publications they want in the blink of an eye, instead of spending hours scrolling through pages of irrelevant results. The project, called GeoLink, is just one part of a growing effort to make literature reviews more efficient by leveraging the increasing ability of computers to process texts. A similar initiative from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle is developing an intelligent search engine for computer science. Called Semantic Scholar, it is expected to be fully released by the end of 2015. If successful, such searching technologies could soon be available in many fields—easing the way to more efficient studies.