Top 5 Websites for Academic Research

It’s no doubt that whenever you are searching online about something related to your assignment or project work, the first thing that comes to your mind is Google. However, when it comes to academic research, the Google search engine does not provide that much detailed and quality research as required for academic purposes. Apart from Google, there are a number of websites dedicated to academic research purposes. In this article, we will discuss the top 5 websites that are specifically designed for academic research.

Such websites can help you to get relevant information required for deep research purposes. Many college students, professors, scientists, researchers, etc make use of such websites for preparing research papers, documents and other academic research.

Top 5 Websites for Academic Research

1. Google Scholar

As the name suggests, this special website or search engine is designed by Google. Google Scholar’s prime purpose is to provide academic research about a wide range of topics. Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Features of Google Scholar:

• Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place
• Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
• Check who’s citing your publications, create a public author profile

Official website link: https://scholar.google.com/

Using Google Scholar for Academic Research video:

2. Microsoft Academic

Microsoft Academic is a free website or search engine, developed by Microsoft, for academic publications and literature. One of its best features is that it provides graphs, maps and trends for your academic research. It contains different types of content including scientific papers, publications, conferences, journals and many other types of academic research papers.

Features of Microsoft Academic:

• Microsoft Academic (MA) makes use of advances in machine learning, semantic inference and knowledge discovery to help you explore scholarly information in more powerful ways than ever before.
• MA is a semantic search engine, not a keyword-based one (It means they match the keywords you type in the search field with the words related to it, and doesn’t rely only on keyword matching).
• It employs natural language processing to understand and remember the knowledge conveyed in each document. Thus it recognizes the user’s intent and delivers results relevant to the user’s intention.
• It also provides related information about the most relevant authors, institutions, publication outlets, and research areas.

Official website link: https://academic.microsoft.com/

Let’s look out the Microsoft Academic Intro video:

3. BASE

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources, e.g. journal articles, preprints, digital collections, images/videos or research data. The BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. It is operated by Bielefeld University Library.

It facilitates effective and targeted searches and retrieves high quality, academically relevant results. The content providers which are included in the BASE are intellectually selected and reviewed.

Features of BASE:

• Content providers are indexed only after a check by qualified personnel of Bielefeld University Library.
• Only document servers and journals that comply with the specific requirements of academic quality and relevance are included.
• Multilingual search (find search terms in more than 20 translated languages)
• The display of search results includes precise bibliographic data
• Several options for sorting the result list (by author, title, date)
• “Refine your search result” options (by author, subject, DDC, year of publication, content provider, language, document type, access and terms of re-use)

Official website link: https://www.base-search.net/

4. CORE

CORE is one of the world’s largest collections of open access research papers. CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research worldwide and deliver unrestricted access for all. It is a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University and Jisc.

It currently contains 207,255,818 open access articles collected from 10,635 data providers around the world. CORE harvests research papers such as institutional and subject repositories, and open access and hybrid journals.

Features of CORE:

• CORE enriches scholarly data using state-of-the-art text and data mining technologies to aid discoverability.
• Enable others to develop new tools and use cases on top of the CORE platform.
• Supports the network of open access repositories and journals with innovative technical solutions.
• Facilitate a scalable, cost-effective route for the delivery of open scholarships.

Official website link: https://core.ac.uk/

Let us see video about Introduction to CORE:

5. RefSeek

RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. It searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.

It’s unique approach offers students comprehensive subject coverage without the information overload of a general search engine—increasing the visibility of academic information and compelling ideas that are often lost in a muddle of sponsored links and commercial results.

Official website link: https://www.refseek.com/

Conclusion:

The Internet is a vast collection of different types of data. If you really need to do deep research on any topic for your academic research purpose, then you surely need to gather information from genuine and reliable sources. These were the top 5 websites or search engines for academic research. These sources mentioned can be of great help to you to make your research powerful. In the end, they will help you to submit quality assignments, project work or research papers.

Are you willing to learn new things? If yes, then check out the list below:

1. Top 10 Engineering YouTube Channels for Engineers
2. How to Land an Internship During COVID-19?
3. Top 10 Study Channels on YouTube
4. Top 10 YouTube channels for College Students – Part 2
5. 10 Things Students Should Know Before They Start Working