Audience: Beginner

Academic research often requires more than entering a question into an ordinary web search. Useful research tools can help you locate scholarly papers, follow citations, find open-access copies, search library collections, and keep track of the sources you plan to use. This guide brings together free tools that serve different parts of that process. No […]

Official destination: https://search.worldcat.org/ WorldCat combines catalog records from thousands of libraries so users can search for books, articles, maps, recordings, scores, images, and other physical or electronic materials. Records can identify libraries that report owning an item. Why it is useful WorldCat is particularly helpful for material that does not appear in an ordinary web […]

Official destination: https://www.zotero.org/ Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager for collecting, organizing, annotating, citing, and sharing research sources. It can capture bibliographic details from the web, organize items, and work with common word processors. Why it is useful Zotero reduces repeated citation work by keeping source details in one library and generating formatted citations […]

Official destination: https://openalex.org/ OpenAlex is an open catalog of scholarly works that connects publications with authors, institutions, sources, topics, funders, and citations. The nonprofit OurResearch provides a web interface, API, and downloadable data. Why it is useful OpenAlex is valuable when the relationships around research matter as much as an individual paper. It can help […]

Official destination: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ PubMed is a free search resource for biomedical and life-science literature, maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It contains citations and abstracts from MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Bookshelf, and related sources. Why it is useful PubMed supports focused health and life-science searching with structured […]

Official destination: https://doaj.org/ DOAJ is an independent index of peer-reviewed open-access journals from around the world. It applies defined inclusion criteria and makes its primary services and metadata openly available across disciplines, countries, and languages. Why it is useful DOAJ gives researchers a focused way to identify journals and articles intended to be openly accessible […]

Official destination: https://core.ac.uk/ CORE indexes open-access research gathered from institutional and subject repositories, preprint servers, and open-access or hybrid journals. Its public search helps people discover research literature and reach available full-text copies from many providers. Why it is useful CORE is a strong follow-up when a scholarly search identifies a paper but the publisher […]

Official destination: https://www.semanticscholar.org/ Semantic Scholar is a free search and discovery tool for scientific literature from the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI. It connects papers, authors, references, citations, and related research, and offers optional library, alert, and research-feed features. Why it is useful The interface can help researchers move beyond an exact keyword match by […]

Google Scholar provides a broad search across journal and conference papers, theses, dissertations, academic books, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature. Results may include citation counts, related articles, formatted citations, and links supplied by a library or publisher. What it helps with It is a practical first search when a question crosses disciplines […]