Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Semantic Scholar is a good academic search engine that allows you to search millions of scholarly articles for academic content relevant to your research topic. Unlike other search engines, Semantic Scholar combines the power of artificial Intelligence, machine learning, language processing   with semantic analytic search enabling users to get more accurate search results. 

Semantic Scholar is a good academic search engine that allows you to search millions of scholarly articles for academic content relevant to your research topic. Unlike other search engines, Semantic Scholar combines the power of artificial Intelligence, machine learning, language processing     

The Internet Archive warehouses all kinds of fantastic materials (and some not-so-fantastic) that can be useful to teachers and students. The trouble with it is the organization is a little clunky for research purposes. Even if you limit the scope of your search to webpages and text you can still spend a lot of time weeding out material that isn't academic in nature. That could be changing now that Internet Archive Scholar is on the horizon. 

If you haven't already seen it, here is a visual featuring what we believe are some of the best academic search engines for teachers and research students. Niche-specific content is usually not readily available through regular generic search engines. One example is the academic and scholarly content. While running a  search query about an academic topic through a generic search engine such as  Google would probably render fairly decent results, it, usually takes digging into so much fluff before finally landing on relevant results. This is where having access to topic-specific search engines comes in handy.

Google Scholar is absolutely one of the best academic search engines out there. It allows you to easily search for and access academic papers and journal articles related to your topic of interest. Besides the search functionality, Scholar also provides you with a host of other interesting features to help you in your research jounrey.

Below is a collection of some handy academic search engines teachers and educators can use to search for and find a wide variety of academic articles, journals, documents and theses. Some of these search engines are subject focused and others are generic.

Trying search tools besides Google is one of the ideas that I feature in Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know. Wolfram Alpha is one of those alternatives to Google that I frequently mention to teachers and students. Wolfram Alpha is best known as a computational search engine that can help students with questions related to math and science.

From science databases to document collections and more, here are 100 of the best search engines for academic research.

Microsoft Academic (MA) is another  great educational resource we add to our list of academic search engines. Unlike mainstream search engines that are keyword-based, MA uses a different search algorithm, it uses what is known as semantic inference to identify your intent and consequently provide you with relevant search results.

We have seen a surge in scientifically minded search engines and browser extensions that aim to supercharge content discovery -- have they cracked the code in mainstream search and retrieval of scholarly literature?

When it comes to searching for  niche-specific content Google search engine is not the best option out there. Although Google can be a good starting point from which you can delve deeper into the content area you are searching but you can save much more time by using content-specific search engines. In today’s post, we are sharing with you some examples of academic search engines student researchers and teachers can use to search for, find and access scholarly content. We are only featuring the most popular titles, but you can always find other options to add to the list.

100 Search Engines For Academic Research