Well, looking for the reliable academic sources on the internet can be a challenging task. Moreover, finding the credible sources for academic research can be a major challenge especially for the college/university students for whom these academic researches holds great amount of necessity. These college/university students conducts research at some point of the time during their academic life. In addition, the professors too have strong views on what counts as a credible academic resource. Therefore, choosing the wrong sources can seriously hurt the grade of these students!
Rather than pulling random facts from the internet and running into problems with citations, these college/university students need to know the ways to find credible sources. Finding the most reliable websites for research starts with evaluating the website itself. Sites run by academic or government organizations usually rank high in reliability. Databases and specialized search engines can also provide some good research sources.
Now, let us have a look over the top 10 best academic research resources –
1) Google Scholar: Google Scholar is a collection of scholarly literature. In this wonderful space, you can access the peer reviews, literature reviews, papers, dissertations, journal articles. In addition, you can also look for physical and online copies. It indexes full text journal articles, theses, books, and other documents!
2) ResearchGate: More than a resource, you could call ResearchGate a ‘social networking site’ for scientists and researchers. Over 11 million researchers submit their work over here, which means you have more than 100 million publications at your disposal. Even if it is not a search engine that pulls from external resources, still it has an impressive collection of publications that provides enough fodder for any inquisitive scholar.
3) Google Books: Google Books helps you to browse through thousands of titles for free! Once you find the book, you can look through the pages and know where to find the book offline.
4) Microsoft Academic: Microsoft Academic pulls content from over 120 million publications, and is a reliable source. The resources available on this site include scientific papers, conferences and journals!
5) BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): BASE calls itself as one of the world’s most voluminous search engines. It has an advanced search option, which narrows down your research and provides the specific format that you need.
6) iSeek: You could call iSeek the Google of scholarly sources, because all it needs is a question or an unfinished thought, and it will work hard to pull out what you’re looking for from scholastic sources. It is safe, intelligent, and timesaving. iSeek pulls out information only from trusted resources like universities, the government, and established non-commercial sites!
7) WorldWideScience: WorldWideScience refers to itself as “The Global Science Gateway!” It is operated by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information and utilizes databases from over 70 countries. When a user types their query in WWW, it sources from databases all over the world, displays both English, and translated results from related journals and academic resources. How great is it that you get access to literature from all languages? It works well to broaden your research data.
8) PubMed Central: For anyone studying anything related to healthcare and science, PubMed Central is perfect. It is operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is a division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. You can access more than 3 million full text journal articles, which includes citations and abstracts to more than 26 million articles!
9) Science.gov: It is operated and maintained by the same department that operates the WorldWideScience. Interestingly, it pulls from over 60 databases, over 2,200 websites and 200 million pages of journals, documents and scientific data. You can filter the search results by author, date, topic and format (text or multimedia).
10) Educational Resources Information Center: The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) has over 1.3 million records of articles and online materials, making it a great academic resource centre. From education related literature, which includes journal articles, books, research syntheses to conference papers, technical reports, policy papers and more, it has everything!
Written By NEEL PREET – Author of the Books, Voice From The East (2016); Journey With Time Place And Circumstances (2018) & Indian Defence Files (2021).
