Science.gov makes it possible for users to search over 60 databases, over 2,200 websites, and over 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information in many formats, including full-text documents, citations, scientific data supporting federally funded research, and multimedia. Science.gov works to raise technical and scientific literacy, serve as a foundation for future discoveries, and foster greater understanding of, access to, and use of the results of public investment in the U.S. government’s science and technology efforts.
FREE
WolframAlpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data. Wolfram Alpha is known for its ability to solve very complex equations in mathematics and physics. However it is capable of much more. For example, students can compare different elements in the periodic table, explore computations for engineering problems, and discover information about living organisms.
FREE WITH PAID OPTIONS AVAILABLE
ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. A study found that over half of the uploaded papers appear to infringe copyright, because the authors uploaded the publisher's version.
FREE
When you're conducting academic research, your university library can be one of your best resources. In addition to online databases, journal articles, and books, your campus library also has academic librarians who can point you to the best sources. When you don't know where to start, reach out to an academic librarian to learn more about your school's research tools. Or use interlibrary loan to get a scanned copy of an article. Many of the campus library's resources are available online, making them easy to access.
PAID
Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database
FREE with Minimum Functionality
Google Scholar is a tool your students can use to search for peer-reviewed articles, court opinions and patents. Scholar is intuitive because it makes use of similar search conventions as Google web search. It also connects to the UAF Rasmuson Library databases to make finding full text articles easy with results that point to articles that cite related research.
FREE
Microsoft Academic gained prominence because it profiled authors, organizations, keywords, and journals and made the dataset available as open data, in contrast to Google Scholar. The search engine indexed over 260 million publications, 88 million of which are journal articles.
FREE with Minimum Functionality
WorldWideScience.org is a global science search engine (Academic databases and search engines) designed to accelerate scientific discovery and progress by accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge. Through a multilateral partnership, WorldWideScience.org enables anyone with internet access to launch a single-query search of national scientific databases and portals in more than 70 countries, covering all of the world's inhabited continents and over three-quarters of the world's population. From a user's perspective, WorldWideScience.org makes the databases act as if they were a unified whole.
PAID
RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
FREE
Lexis Web is your go-to for any law-related inquiries you may have. The results are drawn from legal sites, which can be filtered by criteria such as news, blog, government and commercial. Users can also filter results by jurisdiction, practice area, source and file format.
FREE