New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Students tend to use the internet as the key source of information. However, not all websites have the scholarly material needed to write high-quality academic papers. Besides, the amount of information online can easily overwhelm a student.
That is why students need to use appropriate software programs and databases to find credible research sources. Below are the top academic search engines to use when writing an academic paper.
ERIC
Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) has a wide range of credible educational content. This includes conference proceedings, government publications, dissertations, and journals. ERIC is designed for a large target audience, including learners, educators, scholars, and policymakers. It also provides technical reports, making it an ideal web source for researching an academic topic.
PubMed
Unlike Google Scholar, which has multidisciplinary coverage, this search engine has a long list of content covering a wide array of fields within the health sciences. Students can choose the display results by page and best match based on the phrase used to search or the format of the document.
A user can set the software program to display only the summary/snippet of the abstract and the ranking to be by the date the work was published. Even with free access, this web source is highly authoritative because it provides only peer-reviewed biomedical literature.
This is an ideal academic research tool for medicine and health students. However, only a small fraction of the content is available as free full-text publications. Additionally, people chose PubMed because it includes recent online articles, stores search history and allows the import of multiple selected citations.
Google Scholar
This academic search engine is popular because it's free, has a user-friendly interface, and compresses data based on scholarly content. To ensure credibility, each article gives brief information about the date of publication and the number of times it has been cited.
Google Scholar stands out because when you click on an article, it provides a list of content related to that topic. This narrows down your search process. It's also a great study tool as it covers a wide range of academic topics with content written in formats and writing styles that a student is expected to emulate in academia.
Since journal articles are indexed using bibliographic information and abstracts, it also helps find obscure references that might be difficult to get in conventional databases.
Through this search engine, students can keep up with recent developments in any area of research. However, it only allows access to an abstract and the citation details. Payment is required to read a whole article. Remember, Google Scholar collects content from all over the web, including non-peer-reviewed documents.
So always critically evaluate all research materials. Unlike other search engines, Google Scholar gives greater access to free full-text publications. But you can import only one citation at a time. If you can't find reliable information after researching in different databases, buy essay online, and a subject expert will deliver top-notch compositions.
BASE
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, popularly known as BASE, has a wide variety of scholarly resources for every discipline. It's ideal for researching academic topics since the information obtained will be from peer-reviewed journals, and it also excludes commercial websites.
With the advanced search option, a student can find information from a specific niche that is hard to find in textbooks. Learner can refine their advanced search by year of publication and geographical location.
Scirus
This academic search engine has scientific content and highlights peer-reviewed articles. As a result, it can help a student quickly locate the scientific information needed to write a paper that meets academic standards.
It has an advanced search option that allows students to retrieve content for a specific subject or to be displayed in a particular format like PDF or HTML. It also gives students the freedom to select results from journals or website sources.
Apart from open access and commercial journals, you can also get technical reports and patents from this academic search engine. Scirus also provides links to find results for similar topics. You can also export citations as text or a format that a citation manager can read.
iSeek Education
With this search engine, students find authoritative academic resources that will help them compose a top-notch paper. The cited-by feature allows a student to see the number of scholars that have used that particular article. On the other hand, the editorial review ensures that the content provided in the research result is reputable. Teachers, scholars, and students prefer this platform because all resources are reviewed to ensure they are accurate, specific, and relevant.
Semantic Scholar
This platform uses artificial intelligence to provide search results but only provides academic content. Thus, it has numerous scholarly articles needed to write an academic paper. To make the search results easy, the platform displays abstracts and goes further to help make your research simple by providing rare content.
Semantic Scholar is ideal for students looking to write quality papers because it displays lists of references in a standardized format and may include links to cited sources.
The use of AI also works to provide more accurate search results. After reading the content of an abstract for a particular journal article, you can quickly generate citations in any preferred format. Creating an account on this platform is also recommended because it allows you to do many things, including saving journals for later referencing.
Final Thoughts
Reading the most recent information from the internet has become vital for students at all academic levels. Most people use common search engines because basic search tools often satisfy their needs. Finding information from academic search engines and databases becomes necessary when you can't find it in your school library.
Yes, academic search engines are effective tools for finding information. However, verifying information and ensuring it's credible before using it is best. Alternatively, it's best to research on different academic search engines.
