Top 10 Best Academic Research Resources

• Oct 01, 2020
• 5 min read

• Tags: Academic Editing, Academic Writing

It’s difficult to find the exact paper that you’re looking for in your research. You have to spend hours scrolling through Google, not to mention the dozens of clickbait articles that come your way, like annoying boulders. You already have a lot of work to do and dragging your research will not help. With a multitude of options online, it’s hard to narrow down and pick from the ones that are reliable and accessible. We have compiled a list of 10 academic research resources that will make your work so much easier. 

#1 Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a collection of scholarly literature. In this wonderful space, you can:

• Access peer reviews, literature reviews, papers, dissertations, journal articles.
• 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’s not a search engine that pulls from external resources, 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  “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 and 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 WorldWideScience and 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 center. From education-related literature which includes journal articles, books, research syntheses to conference papers, technical reports, policy papers and more, it has everything! 

A few honorable mentions:

JSTOR

JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City, United States. At first, it contained only digitized back issues of academic journals. Now, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals and provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. The only catch is that after a limit of 10 articles, you will have to buy a subscription to access its entire database. 

American Psychological Association (APA)

The American Psychological Association is the United States’ largest congregation of psychologists, with over 121,000 members which include scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has an impressive public database which comprises over 5.1 million journal articles for psychology students and researchers to access. 

TED Talks

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks was conceived in February 1984 by Richard Saul Wurman as a public conference. It hosts speakers from all over the world and covers an interesting array of topics in the three domains in an engaging fashion. 

And there you have it! It’s research and dissertation season and we hope that these resources help you lessen that anxiety over finding the most credible resources. For more insights into academic writing, check out the PaperTrue Resource Center! 

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Rishi

Rishi was a zealous student at IIT Bombay when he realized, firsthand, the power of good language in effective communication. As part of this belief, after a brief stint in a hedge fund, he co-founded PaperTrue in 2014.