100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious Scholars

From onlineuniversities.com: find all the links at http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/03/100-time-saving-search-engines-for-serious-scholars/

While burying yourself in the stacks at the library is one way to get some serious research done, with today’s technology you can do quite a bit of useful searching before you ever set foot inside a library. Undergraduates and grad students alike will appreciate the usefulness of these search engines that allow them to find books, journal articles and even primary source material for whatever kind of research they’re working on and that return only serious, academic results so time isn’t wasted on unprofessional resources.

General

Start off your research with one of these more general academic search engines.

  1. Intute: Use this website’s search tools to find the best and most reliable sites to start your research.
  2. Academic Info: Search or browse through this site for listings of the best academic websites out there.
  3. iSeek: Designed for teachers, students and scholars, this search engine only returns relevant and reliable results.
  4. RefSeek: This academic search engine will help you find useful reference material from predominately .edu, .org and .gov sites.
  5. VirtualLRC: The Virtual Learning Resources Center is a good place to start looking for material that can help you in your studies.
  6. Academic Index: Find information that can set the stage for your future research using this helpful search tool.
  7. BUBL Link: If you like your resources organized by the Dewey Decimal System, this site is perfect for your online research.
  8. Digital Library of the Commons: This site organizes all the best free information on the web including articles, books, images and even dissertations in one easily searchable place.

Meta Search

Want to search it all at once? Try these tools that let you search multiple sites at once, saving you the time of doing so on your own.

  9. Dogpile: Search Google, Yahoo, Bing and more at once with this great search engine.
  10. MetaCrawlerWeb: By searching several search sites at once you’ll save time and get better results when you use this tool.
  11. mamma: Find news, images, video or web results from the top search sites on the web here.
  12. Myriad Search: This site lets you customize your search of multiple search engines.
  13. HotBot: Choose which search tool you’d like to use when searching through the information found here.
  14. SurfWax: This customizable search engine lets you search through Wikipedia, RSS feeds, news and more.
  15. Clusty: This site searches through several other search engines and organizes the results into clustered and more easily manageable groups.
  16. Copernic Agent: Try out this tool to search through a variety of engines on the web, sort out your desktop or find a piece of news you know is out there.

Databases and Archives

Databases and archives can be a great place to find primary and secondary sources for your work, so use these online search tools to dive into them headfirst.

  17. Library of Congress: This huge library has a large number of fully-searchable archives containing books, source documents, photos and more.
  18. Archives Hub: Using this site you’ll get access to the archives of major UK universities and colleges.
  19. Archival Research Catalog: Browse through the holdings of the US National Archives or use their helpful search tool to find just what you’re looking for.
  20. arXiv: Find articles on physics, math, computer science, biology and finance using this amazing and expansive archival database.
  21. Celestial Registered Archives: This site is a search engine for archives themselves, letting you search through and find collections that might meet your needs.
  22. Archivenet: Try out this Dutch site for access to archival materials found in the Netherlands and around Europe.
  23. NASA Historical Archive: Find relevant information on NASA’s space missions, history, and more on this site.
  24. National Agricultural Library: If your research involves agriculture, you may want to see what this government search engine and archive has to offer.
  25. The Smithsonian Institution Research Information System: The Smithsonian is one of the largest museums in the world, and you can find out more about what they have in their holdings using this helpful search engine.
  26. UNESCO Archives Portal: This site is an excellent resource for finding out what archives are out there, how to find them, and how you can get access to them for research.
  27. The British Library Archives: As one of the largest libraries in the world, these archives hold an impressive amount of information that you can search through here.

Books and Journals

You don’t always have to head to the library to do research in books and journals. Try these great search engines from home to see what’s out there.

  28. WorldCat: If in the course of your research you’ve found a book you need and your local library doesn’t have it, what do you do? That’s where this search engine is incredibly useful, letting you find out the next closest library where you can access the material.
  29. Google Books: While not all the books on here are represented in full-text, it’s still a great search tool for finding books that could serve you well in your research and getting a sneak peek at what they hold inside.
  30. Scirus: This search engine will return only high-quality scientific information from journals, so you know you’re not wasting your time with unusable sources.
  31. HighBeam Research: This tool lets you search through over 6,000 publications in one place.
  32. Vadlo: Look through loads of biomedical and life sciences articles on this site.
  33. Open Library: If you need books and you need them now, see what this free and public domain library has to offer.
  34. Online Journals Search Engine: Find just about every journal out there that’s available online, both free and pay, with this search engine.
  35. Google Scholar: While regular Google can be a helpful tool, sometimes you just need scholarly results, and that’s just what this tool does, paring down results to the most reliable and academic sources.
  36. Bioline International: Through this site you can search through free and open access medical journals.
  37. SpringerLink: While searching through this site is free, you may need to pay to see the full text of some articles.
  38. Directory of Open Access Journals: If you don’t have the budget to pay for articles, try out this search engine. It’ll show you where the best free online journals related to your subject area can be found.