The Best Search Engines For Scientific Writing

A search engine is a web-based tool that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web. It is are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is really a general class of programs, however, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Although search engines may not be the best places to find sources to use in your writing, they are an fastest place to start your paper writing process. Below are some available search engines!

Google Scholar and Google Books- Google Scholar is the world’s largest and most-used academic search engine. These are search engines that actually do filter for scholarly reputable sources! Feel free to incorporate some of what you find here directly into your paper! Google scholar also has a feature that tracks your citations, so once you find a piece of great material, you can hold on to it!

iSEEK - Designed specifically for students and educators, iSEEK is a non-commercial search engine that delivers editor-reviewed results from universities, government sites and other noncommercial providers.


RefSeek- With more than 1 billion documents, web pages, books, journals, newspapers, and more, RefSeek offers authoritative resources in just about any subject, without all of the mess of sponsored links and commercial results.

Virtual LRC -The Virtual Learning Resources Center has created a custom Google search, featuring only the best of academic information websites. This search is curated by teachers and library professionals around the world to share great resources for academic projects.

Academic Index -This scholarly search engine and web directory was created just for college students. The websites in this index are selected by librarians, teachers, and educational consortia. Be sure to check out their research guides for history, health, nursing studies, criminal justice, and more.

BUBL LINK -If you love the Dewey Decimal system, this Internet resource catalog is a great resource. Search using your own keywords, or browse subject areas with Dewey subject menus.

Digital Library of the Commons Repository -Check out the DLC to find international literature including free and open access full-text articles, papers, and dissertations.

OAIster -Search the OAIster database to find millions of digital resources from thousands of contributors, especially open access resources.

Internet Public Library -Find resources by subject through the Internet Public Library’s database.

Infomine -The Infomine is an incredible tool for finding scholarly Internet resource collections, especially in the sciences.

Microsoft Academic Search -Microsoft’s academic search engine offers access to more than 38 million different publications, with features including maps, graphing, trends, and paths that show how authors are connected.

Wolfram|Alpha -Using expert-level knowledge, this search engine doesn’t just find links; it answers questions, does analysis, and generates reports.

OJOSE - The Online JOurnal Search Engine (OJOSE) is a search engine that can help you find, download or purchase scientific publications from over 60 different databases.

Scirus - Scirus is another search engine focused on the sciences. It has indexed over 410 million scientific items, including journal articles, patent information, scientists' web pages and institutional repositories.

DMOZ - Although it's technically not a search engine because it doesn't index the whole Web, DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project, offers searchable access to millions of links that have been hand-picked by volunteers who are experts in their fields.

Google - Google is a great place to get a huge amount of information at once. Google also provides specialized searches through blogs, catalogs, videos, news items and more. It is also fantastic in that it provides you with a live feed of current events. You can find out the most up-to-date information at anytime!

Yahoo.com, Excite.com, MSN.com, AOL.com- These engines are fantastic if you have no idea what you want to write about. So often we hear “research paper” and our minds go blank with panic. These sites not only provide news feeds from all around the world, they also give you an immediate way to discover more about any interesting story you may find!

Bing.com- Bing is an off-shoot of MSN.com. It is a great place to grab some keywords and amass a large index of related information. Another great aspect of Bing is its images feature. Too often we forget that some papers are trying to explain a visual. Anything from 60’s fashion to deforestation can be enhanced with the immediate reference of a photograph!

Snap.com-  The creators of this search engine set it up so that the process of searching became a brainstorm within itself! This site is very useful in the earliest stages of the writing process for garnering keywords and narrowing a topic for your thesis. You can also add the snap-shot add on to get a glimpse of the sites of your choosing at a glance!

Search.com- This is a super search engine! Search.com combines all of the result that you would find on a Google search with those of Yahoo and Bing! You should use this engine when you want to access a lot of information as quickly as possible.

Baidu.com- The Baidu offers many services, including a Chinese language-search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu offers 57 search and community services including Baidu Baike (an online collaboratively built encyclopedia) and a searchable, keyword-based discussion forum. Baidu offers several services to locate information, products and services using Chinese-language search terms, such as, search by Chinese phonetics, advanced search, snapshots, spell checker, stock quotes, news, knows, postbar, images, video and space information, and weather, train and flight schedules and other local information.

Yamli.com- Yamli is an Internet start-up focused on addressing the problems specific to the Arabic web. Yamli currently offers two main products: the smart Arabic keyboard, and Yamli Arabic Search. The smart Arabic keyboard allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard from within their web browser. This technology is based on a real-time transliteration engine which converts words typed with Latin characters to their closest Arabic equivalent. Yamli Arabic search is a search engine focused on providing more relevant search results for an Arabic query by expanding it to its most frequently used Latin representations.