10 Great Academic Search Engines You can Use for Research

Conducting research can be such a strenuous task and sometimes frustrating when you don't have the right tools or resources to aid you in your research. Having access to the internet is not enough to enhance your research; the internet or the World Wide Web contains lots of information which we can regard as public web content and using search engines like google to retrieve academic contents for your research may yield very little results.

In view of this, we would like to help you with your research activities by revealing to you 10 great academic search engines that you can use to retrieve useful academic content and publications from databases over the internet. So if you are a student, a teacher or a researcher, these search engines would surely be of immense help in your research work.

1. Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/


This search engine has been fully explained in my previous article. Google Scholar is one great tool that you can use to search for and locate scholarly articles and publications from online databases. It is one tool that every researcher should know how to use. In our previous article on how to use Google Scholar for Research, we revealed 6 great ways you can make the best use of Google Scholar. You can find the article here.


2. Institute of Education Sciences (ERIC) https://eric.ed.gov/


This search engine enables you to search and locate journals and other scholarly materials housed and sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences. The search engine was designed to use smart search technology. If you type your keywords without quotes or advanced Boolean logic, the most relevant results will appear as the first results but you can also use more complex search strategies to get more results. You can learn how to use the advanced search at http://eric.ed.gov/?advanced or watch this video to learn more.


3. Virtual Learning Resources Center http://www.virtuallrc.com/


This is another great search engine that can be used to retrieve academic content from the World Wide Web. The Resources center indexes thousands of academic information websites selected by teachers and library professionals all over the world, and as such provides up-to-date and valid information sources for researchers.


4. CiteULike http://www.citeulike.org


This is an interesting tool every researcher should be familiar with. CiteULike is a free Library service that allows you to store, organize and also share your scholarly papers. As a researcher, collecting papers from different sources, especially the internet, you need to have a system for organizing your papers so as not to leave out very important information when collating your work. How does it work?
When you search the internet for papers, and find any that interests you, you can easily save such paper from your web browser into your free library space already allocated to you on the CiteULike's server. You can also access your Library from any location and with any computer, provided you have internet connection.
In addition to it being a Library service, it is also a search engine as it grants access to thousands of scholarly papers stored in its database.


5. JURN http://www.jurn.org


This is another great search tool that enables you to search for and retrieve open access academic books and journals. It was initially established to cover publications in the arts and humanities but today JURN has expanded to now cover publications also in the sciences, biomedical, business and law. JURN now also covers selected universities full text repositories, examples are UK, US, Irish, New Zealand, Australia, Central and Latin America and so on as well as from African repositories  like Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.


6. Microsoft Academic http://academic.research.microsoft.com/


This is an academic search engine from Microsoft. This new search tool was built in collaboration with Bing to make it more scalable, responsive and compatible with modern web browsers, and provides access to academic content from over 120 million publications.


7. Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/


The Library of Congress is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. It is the largest library in the world with millions of collections ranging from books, recordings, photographs, maps, newspapers and manuscripts. As an online researcher who may not be residing within the US, you would find the online library service very useful. The Library also houses thousands of digital collections from various disciplines.


8. Science Direct http://www.sciencedirect.com/

 
More of an online database, Science Direct houses and provides access to over 14 million publications from over 3,800 journals and more than 35,000 books in the science and health disciplines. An interesting point to note about Science Direct is that, in addition to its millions of journal publications, over 250,000 publications are open access. With such great tool and with smart and intuitive functionality,  students, teachers and researchers, will no doubt be able to perform academic research more effectively and efficiently. 


9. Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu


In addition to it being a search tool for academic research, Academia.edu is a social networking website for academics. It is a platform where researchers can share their research work with fellow research friends and also follow research in a particular field.


10. RefSeek http://www.refseek.com/


RefSeek is another useful search engine for researchers as it helps to make academic content easily accessible to everyone. With a database of over 1 billion documents, web pages, books, journals, newspapers, online encyclopedias and articles, Refseek is your ultimate companion for academic research.


There you have it! These search engines do not only provide specific content tailored to a research topic but also content found on these sites are more likely to be reliable and authoritative.

Please drop your comments and let us know if you find these tips helpful. If you have other suggestions to add to our list, please share with us!



Images were taken from www.educatorstechnology.com





 
10 Great Academic Search Engines You can Use for Research 10 Great Academic Search Engines You can Use for Research Reviewed by Crystal Edge on 2:08:00 pm Rating: 5

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