16 academic search engines that will make you forget about Google

Google is the world search master, but something is missing. And that something is the reliability of the information it retrieves—almost nothing. Google indexes countless websites without taking into account the veracity of the content. It also shows search results based on its own interests (advertising) and based on its algorithm for ordering the results (a mystery). Facts that mean that you have to be very attentive when carrying out work or study on a certain area and separating the important and pertinent from what is not in the search engine.

But all is not lost. Luckily some libraries can really give you the information you need without any economic interest or any other kind behind it. There are also many academic search engines, scientific databases, scientific portals, and electronic publications with free access (many of them), allowing you to locate the information you need reliably and securely with a simple search. And for a sample, a few:

SciELO

SciELO – Scientific Electronic Library Online is a model for cooperative electronic publishing of scientific journals on the Internet. Specially developed to respond to scientific communication needs in developing countries and particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, the model provides an efficient solution to ensure visibility and universal access to its scientific literature, contributing to overcoming the phenomenon. Known as ‘lost science’.

Dialnet

Dialnet is one of the largest databases of the scientific content in Ibero-American languages ​​and has various documentary resources: Journal articles, Articles of collective works, Books, Conference proceedings, Bibliographic reviews, Doctoral theses. The objective is to integrate the largest possible number of resources, seeking as far as possible access to their full texts, clearly betting on open access to scientific literature.

World wide science

WorldWideScience.org is a gateway to global science made up of national and international scientific databases and portals. WorldWideScience.org accelerates scientific discovery and progress by providing a one-stop-shop for databases from around the world. It is multilingual and provides real-time search and translation of globally dispersed scientific literature.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar (Google Scholar) provides an easy way to search for academic literature. You can search through many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and opinions… from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other websites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant jobs within the world of academic research. [Although in this post, I mention a series of academic search engines to forget about Google, Google Scholar should be taken into account].

Scholarpedia

Scholarpedia is a free access encyclopedia of texts reviewed and maintained by academic experts from around the world. Scholarpedia is inspired by Wikipedia and aims to complement it by providing in-depth treatments of academic topics. Scholarpedia articles are peer-reviewed and subject to expert curation.

Academia.edu

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share their research work. The company’s mission is to accelerate world research. Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, oversee in-depth analyses of their research’s full impact, and keep track of research that academics follow. There are more than 33 million registered scholars, and they have added more than 10 million articles and almost 2 million researches.

Springer link

Springer Link provides researchers with access to millions of scientific journal papers, books, series, protocols, and reference works.

Refseek

RefSeek (currently in public beta) is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible. RefSeek searches over a billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, magazines, and newspapers. It offers students broad subject coverage without the information overload of a general search engine, thus increasing the visibility of academic information and compelling ideas that are often lost in a tangle of sponsored links and commercial results.

CERN Document Server

Access to articles, reports and multimedia content on particle physics.

Microsoft Academic

Find out what you need fast from over 80 million posts. Semantic search provides you with highly relevant results for continuously updated academic content.

JURN

JURN is a unique search tool to find free academic articles and books. Offers extensive e-journal coverage of the arts and humanities, and the natural world and ecology. JURN harnesses the full power of Google but focuses your search through a curated and handcrafted index that has been developed and refined over six years.

Science.Science.gov

Science.Science.gov searches more than 60 databases and more than 2,200 websites from 15 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of highly authoritative US scientific information, including research and development results.

BASE

BASE (Bielefeld Academy Search Engine) is one of the world’s largest search engines, especially for academic open access web resources, developed by the Bielefeld University Library. BASE offers more than 80 million documents from more than 4,000 sources. The full texts of approximately 60-70% of the indexed documents can be accessed.

ERIC

ERIC makes current and cutting-edge educational resources readily available for research and practice. Among all academic search engines, it is one of the best in the area of ​​Education.

ScienceResearch.com

ScienceResearch.com is an engine that makes its technology available to the public to search the deep web and return quality results (in real-time) by presenting results from other search engines. Returns result from 300 science and technology collections, removing duplicate results and displaying them by relevance to the search.

iSEEK Education

iSEEK Education is a dedicated search engine that compiles hundreds of thousands of authority resources from university, government, and established noncommercial providers. It provides a smart search and a personal Web-based library to immediately locate the most relevant results, saving time by quickly finding information.

Without a doubt, these academic search engines will make you forget about Google. Of course, never forget to compliment your needs and searches with your library.