What will you do if you want to find an information? Obviously 99% would say ‘Google Search’. Then, 1% for those who are still to figure Google! But Google search is not the right stop when you go for academic search queries. Due to its lack of exactness, Google fails in academic search queries. Not to worry though, there are some smart options available which can help you resolve this issue. There are some academic search engines available which can trim down your task to a considerable amount.
Then what to do for these academic search queries? Do we have a special search engine for them too? Yes, of course. We have many academic search engines available but all are not so significant.
Here now is the list of ten academic search engine for your ease.
1. AcademicInfo
AcademicInfo gives you an in-depth search option. You can get information related to colleges, courses and educational references. The interface of the search engine is very user-friendly. You can easily browse through all the sections related to your queries.
2. Archival Research Catalogue
Archival Research Catalogue or in short ARC is a search engine catalogue of the US National Archives and Records Administration. ARC allows you to search descriptions of National Archives holdings or you can go for basic and advanced options where you can do a in-depth search. You can also see the option of student and teachers in ARC.
3. Base
Base is considered to be world’s most voluminous search engine in terms of academic open source web access. Recently, they got more than 2500 sources which you can see on their site too. Base provides you two options to search – basic and advanced search. Even you can check your search history too.
4. CiteULike
CiteULike is a search engine who holds the scholarly references. It is a free service. Number of articles added in this is displayed on the homepage itself with the advantages you will get while searching. You can join CiteULike through your Facebook account too.
5. Eric
Eric which stands for Education Resources Information Center. It is the world’s largest digital library of education literature. You can search the literature by their title, author, descriptor and Eric#. It is sponsored by Institute of Science Education (IES).
6. Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a very simple and freely accessible web search engine. It allows you to search digital or physical copies of articles. It also provides a variety of feature such as ‘cited by’, ‘group of’.
7. InfoMine
InfoMine is a search engine which collects scholarly Internet resources. It is a virtual library where you can find Internet sources related to faculty, students and staffs.
8. LibGuides Community
LibGuides community helps you to search the guides provide by the thousands of librarians from different library. It aggregates all the public content from institutions. You can search the library based upon the location too.
9. Library of Congress
You can search a variety of formats such as audio, book, manuscript, music score, newspaper etc. You have the option to ask librarian too about your requirement.
10. RefSeek
RefSeek is having a very simple user interface with just a search box with 2-3 links. It is mainly developed for students and researchers to make information easily accessible.
Contributor: This guest post is written by Ricky Shah who is also a developer behind VTUS, an educational website. He provides guidance to VTU students. If you’re looking to get admission in VTU, then you might want to check out his post on best engineering colleges in Bangalore which is also affiliated with VTU University.
