Every click of the mouse, every search box, needs to work hard to make the best use of a researcher’s time. For each gem of a resource that a researcher discovers, there may be a dozen abandoned web pages, armies of half-read abstracts and false leads. Knowing how, and where, to search for resources is vital for saving time and getting quickly to the results that matter. 

One of the best ways to increase your hit-rate is by going beyond Google to a specific academic search engine or database. Here, we outline the top search engines and resources that work hard for researchers to help them get the figures, answers and arguments they need. 

Scientific queries

WolframAlpha

What is it? A so-called ‘answer engine’, the service answers queries directly based on the search terms rather than providing a list of results.

Key features: Search for information about domain names and compare websites. It also has various maths and statistics functions.

Neil says: “WolframAlpha is probably the most innovative of the answer engines. It attempts to answer free-text questions or provide information about things rather than supply a list of web sites tagged as connected with a subject.”

Open access search engines

CORE

What is it? An experimental service, allowing keyword and semantic search of over 10 million open access articles.

Key feature: If you find an article you like, CORE will find similar ones by analysing the text of that article.

BASE

What is it? BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources from over 2,000 sources.

Key features: Allows you to search intellectually selected resources and their bibliographic data, including those from the so-called ‘deep web’, which are ignored by commercial search engines. There are several options for sorting the results list and you can browse by Dewey Decimal Classification and document type.

Neil explains: “BASE is bigger than CORE, but the discovery tools are not as advanced.”

Library catalogues

Copac

What is it? A Jisc service allowing you to look through the catalogues of over 70 major UK and Irish libraries.

Key features: Good for locating books and other material held in research collections in the UK;  especially useful for humanities.

Rachel explains: “It gets over 13 million searches a year from higher and further education, so it is a very well used service.”

Primo Central

What is it? The Primo Central Index is a mega-aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources of global and regional importance.

Key features: The search includes journal articles, e-books, reviews, legal documents and more that are harvested from primary and secondary publishers, aggregators and open-access repositories.

Rachel comments: “Many researchers might not even know their library has this tool – it just looks like the library catalogue to them – but is much more than that.”

Zetoc

What is it? One of the world’s most comprehensive research databases, this Jisc service gives you access to over 28,000 journals and more than 52 million article citations and conference papers through the British Library’s electronic table of contents.

Key features: Researchers can get email alerts of the table of contents in journals, keeping them up to date with the latest literature in their field. 

Neil says: “This is a very popular feature and is an easy way to search back to previous articles to support your research.”

Europeana

What is it? This is a meta-catalogue of cultural heritage collections from a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The catalogue includes books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings.

Features: You can download your resource, print it, use it, save it, share it and play with it.

Neil tells us: “This is hugely important for the humanities and some social sciences.”

Social web

Twitter

What is it? Harness the power of social discovery and particularly the #icanhazpdf hashtag for locating PDFs that you do not have access to through your institution.

Features: Tweet an article you need using this hashtag and someone will point you to a copy that you can access.

Reference management and discovery services

Mendeley and Zotero

What are they? They are both ways to share reference lists, citations, and even full papers in the case of Mendeley.

Key feature: Save, organise and store your references so that you can remain organised ready for the final write-up.

Rachel says: “You can read a review comparing them on the University of Cambridge website.”