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Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches academic servers such as academic publishers, university repositories, research institutions, scholarly societies, etc.,
but exact sources are not made transparent by Google Inc.
Various publication types such as journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports, patents and “other scholarly literature”,
but no filter for publication types

Google Scholar search tips

• If you want to just find the newest articles, limit the time range on the left hand side.
• You can see if the article is online available at UZH, if the SFX link shows up on the right hand side of the article
• If you sign in, you have the possibility to claim all your publications and Google Scholar will provide you with the metrics like citations, h-index and i10-index. Additionally you will be able to create alerts.
• If words belong together, put them in quotation marks (e.g. «climate change»)
• Be careful with the relevance ranking, as this correlates closely to the citation count, which will place older articles in higher ranking.

BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

BASE offers an alternative way to search for academic information and is one of the world’s most biggest search engine for academic web resources and provides more than 120 million documents from more than 6,000 sources.
In comparison to commercial search engines, BASE is characterised by the following features:

• Only document servers that comply with the specific requirements of academic quality and relevance are included, and the resources are intellectually selected.
• Display of access and terms of re-use for a document
• Several options for sorting the result list
• “Refine your search result” options (by author, subject, DDC, year of publication, content provider, language, document type, access and terms of re-use)
• If you choose the option “Multilingual synonyms (Eurovoc Thesaurus)” in the basic search you can also search for synonyms and translations, provided that the search term is included in Eurovoc Thesaurus. All in all 239,000 terms from 21 languages are included in Eurovoc.
• Plural, genitive and other word forms will be searched automatically. To disable this feature, choose “Verbatim search” in the basic search or unselect the search box “find additional word forms” in the advanced search.

Microsoft Academic (previous Microsoft Academic Search)

Microsoft Academic has relaunched their academic search completely. Research on the quantity of ressources shows, that the gap to Google Scholar has diminished.

• Microsoft Academic claims to be a semantic search engine, not a keyword-based one, which means it understands the meaning of words.
• Filter for publication types
• Like Google Scholar exact sources are not made transparent

And there are many more academic search machines

• Science Research
• Core
• OAIster
• World Wide Science
• FreeFullPdf
• Paperity
• OpenGrey
• OpenAIRE
• Q-Sensei Docs

For further information and support consult: naturwissenschaften@hbz.uzh.ch