If you are a student or researcher and work on an essay, thesis or research paper, you know how hard it is sometimes to find the relevant and factual sources you need. Most professors are very strict in standards, and some of them don’t even allow the use of sites like Wikipedia or even daily newspapers as sources. What they require are scientific publications and articles from journals and books related to your field of study.
Finding good PDF research papers and publications published in reputable journals is hard because not many of those are publicly available due to copyright issues. To avoid going through this hassle, you can use relevant copies from various educational web pages available only for personal educational use, or you can go to your local or university library to get your hands on these PDFs.
We will present to you today the best search engines available online that can help you to find relevant academic papers needed for your studies and schoolwork.
1. Google Scholar
Google Scholar is the best online tool for finding academic papers and publications. Enter a name or a topic in the search field and you will be presented with a list of results, just like when you are using the regular Google search engine. As you can see in the search results you get, there is a possibility to view number of citations. At the left side of every book you can see if the PDF version is freely available.
If the immediate link does not work or you are not happy with the file you have found, check the More versions link in hopes of finding a better or more suitable version of the PDF. Results can be conveniently sorted by date as well and the related articles link is also useful for finding more similar sources.
2. Microsoft Academic Search
Microsoft similarly offers a good and fast way to find academic articles. It is a bit different, however, since this search engine shows a wider variety of information, ranging from definitions of terms to academic journals and links for the authors of these various works.
If there is a PDF version of a file available it will also be shown with a direct link, as you can see on the photo.
3. PubMed
This website is specifically oriented towards biomedical and life science literature.
4. SciVerse
This is a pretty comprehensive search engine with various advanced possibilities that allow you to sav your searches for future reference and organize your studies and the academic materials you are using to learn.
5. ArXiv
This site gives you access to more than 700,000 publicly available publications from the field of physics, math and computer science.
