Are you having tough time with your papers? Creating those has never been a piece of cake. And no matter how well you go through your writing manual, there’s no use of it unless you see a great bunch of real examples. But where to find those? We have collected 7 academic papers databases and science search engines that will be of great use when either choosing a topic for your own paper, or organizing and referencing it. Use the following free sources to find an academic writing example that you will follow when creating your own paper.
1. ArXiv
This database from Cornell University has papers on different subjects, including Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Biology, Finance, and Statistics. It is a free repository of various research papers, all of which meet the requirements of Cornell University. The reprints are available for free in the PDF and other formats.
2. BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
The current search engine was created at the Bielefeld University, Germany. It offers a variety of resources for students, but mainly, bibliographic data and abstracts. There are also manuscripts, theses, and lecture materials in all subjects. Sometimes, full texts can be also available.
3. WorldWideScience
This one is a science search engine. It offers access to a number of databases, including the “deep web” databases, the ones, which cannot be accessed via search engines like Google. WorldWideScience provides students with full-text documents in multiple languages.
4. The Directory of Open Access Journals
This database lists a variety of scholarly and scientific journals with open access. In 2015, it included over 10,000 journals. The range of subjects is also quite large. For example, you can access journal articles in Technology, Medicine, Science, History, and Literature.
5. CogPrints
CogPrints is an archive that contains over 2,000 of articles. All of them are free to download. In general, this website is a free repository of self-archived papers in numerous disciplines. They range from Philosophy and Linguistics to Neuroscience and Computer Science. Apart from research papers, the repository provides access to conference papers, journal articles, theses, and even preprints and unpublished materials.
6. Microsoft Academic Search
Created as an experiment at first, Microsoft Academic Search then became a global search engine with an access to more than 80 million various publications. These papers include peer-reviewed journal articles as well as news articles from the trusted news sources. The range of subjects is vast. To name a few academic fields, there are Art, Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Computer Science. Among the advantages of the MAS we could name a neatly-looking UI and the fact that the search results are available in multiple languages.
7. ScienceOpen
ScienceOpen is the open research and publishing network featuring over 23 million articles and papers (among which there are articles, reviews, and abstracts). It can be beneficial to students of various disciplines, such as Arts and Humanities, Science, Economics and Social Sciences, Computer Science, Medicine, Mathematics, among others. The website allows advanced search by authors, keywords, publishers, or disciplines. It also features Groups, spaces that people can join when they are interested in a particular area of research. Groups serve to offer peer-to-peer help on a broad range of academic issues.
Here, we have reviewed 7 biggest free academic search engines and publishing networks where students can get research papers and use them as reference sources or academic writing examples. Of course, there are more of a kind in existence, mainly those that require academic subscription or offer access to papers for a certain price. We hope that the ones listed here will help you improve your academic writing skills and the quality of your own papers.