Document Delivery Services : The Top List of Academic Search Engines
The Best Search Engines for Academic Research
Academic search engines have become the number one resource to turn to in order to find research papers and other scholarly sources. While classic academic databases are locked behind paywalls, Google Scholar and others can be accessed free of charge. In order to help you get your research done fast, we have compiled the top list of academic search engines.
If you want your work to be of high quality, then you certainly need to gather information from genuine and reliable sources. The sources mentioned below can be of great help to you in making your research powerful. Ultimately, they will enable you to submit quality projects and assignments.
Academic Info
Academic Info contains an in-depth directory of the most useful links and resources within a specific subject area. You can browse through this website to get a list of useful academic websites for research. This site also offers online degrees, online courses and distance learning information from a selection of online accredited schools.
Virtual LRC
Virtual LRC or The Virtual Learning Resources Center allows you to explore educational sites with high-quality information. It has indexed thousands of academic information websites. On top of that, with the custom Google search, you will be able to get more refined results, which will help you complete your research in less time. It has been organized by teachers and library professionals around the world to provide students with great resources for academic assignments and projects. In short, Virtual LRC is the best place to start looking for research material that can help you in your studies.
Base
BASE is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany and that's where it name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).
- Coverage: approx. 136 million articles (contains duplicates)
- Abstracts: ✔
- Related articles: ✘
- References: ✘
- Cited by: ✘
- Links to full text: ✔
- Export formats: RIS, BibTeX
Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. Its mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI-powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.
Coverage: approx. 40 million articles
Abstracts: ✔
Related articles: ✔
References: ✔
Cited by: ✔
Links to full text: ✔
Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX
Google Scholar
As the name suggests, Google Scholar is an academic search engine from the house of Google. Specially designed to search for scholarly literature, it helps you find relevant information from the world of scholarly research. With Google Scholar, you can explore many sources such as books, dissertations, articles and abstracts from various academic publishers, professional societies, universities, and other websites. In May 2014, third-party researchers estimated that the Google Scholar database contains roughly 160 million documents.
It not only lets you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free but also often provides links to full-text PDF files.
- Coverage: approx. 200 million articles
- Abstracts: only a snippet of the abstract is available
- Related articles: ✔
- References: ✔
- Cited by: ✔
- Links to full text: ✔
- Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, RIS, BibTeX
Microsoft Academic Search
Microsoft Academic Search is a great search engine from the software giant Microsoft. It gives you the ability to explore more than 38 million publications. One of the best features of this search engine is that it provides trends, graphs, and maps for your academic research. It contains more than 40 million publications and 20 million authors.
Science.gov
Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies.
There is no need anymore to query all those resources separately!
Coverage: approx. 200 million articles and reports
- Abstracts: ✔
- Related articles: ✘
- References: ✘
- Cited by: ✘
- Links to full text: ✔ (available for some databases)
- Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX (available for some databases)
Refseek
Refseek is an academic search engine that is simpler than Google even in appearance. Refseek does not claim to offer more results than Google. Instead, it removes results that are not related to science, academia, and research. The best thing about Refseek is that you can search for information related to your subject without getting distracted by sponsored links. With a database of over one billion documents, web pages, books, journals, newspapers, online encyclopedias, and articles, Refseek is your ultimate companion for academic research.
Core
Core is an academic search engine dedicated to open access to research papers. For each search result, a link to the full-text PDF or full-text web page is provided.
Coverage: approx. 136 million articles
- Abstracts: ✔
- Related articles: ✔
- References: ✘
- Cited by: ✘
- Links to full text: ✔ (all articles in CORE are open access)
- Export formats: BibTeX
Baidu Scholar
JURN is a search tool for free academic articles and books. JURN is powered by a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) but focusses its search through a “hand-picked” and curated index and is run without any adverts. Established in 2009 to cover the arts and humanities, it has since expanded its scope and now also covers selected university full text repositories and many additional ejournals in science, biomedical, ecology, business and law. The search tool is aimed at educators, students, scholars and researchers