When you're on a budget, legitimate and free magazine articles are a valuable resource. We've done the hard work for you and compiled a list of the 21 best sources for free access to scientific journals, updated for 2021. With so many online resources available, it's difficult to narrow them down and find those that are reliable, useful, and free for students. We've saved you time and picked our top 15 free search engines for research. Google Scholar was created as a tool to gather academic literature from the web. From one place, students can search for peer-reviewed articles, theses, books, abstracts, and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities, and other academic organizations.
In the US, the Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) is an excellent tool for academic research with more than 1.3 million bibliographic records of online articles and materials. ERIC provides access to a wide range of education-related literature, including journal articles, books, research summaries, conference papers, technical reports, policy documents, and more. With more than eight million searches each month, it's no wonder why this search engine is an excellent web source for education. ResearchGate is a unique social networking site for scientists and researchers. More than 11 million researchers present their work on the site - totaling more than 100 million publications - so that anyone can access it.
You can search by publication, data and author, or even ask researchers questions. While not a search engine that relies on external sources, ResearchGate's own collection of publications offers an abundant selection for any curious scholar. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is proud to be “one of the most voluminous search engines in the world” - especially for academic web resources. With 4,000 sources, the site contains results from more than 100 million documents. The advanced search option allows users to narrow their research so that they can find books, reviews, lectures, videos or theses in the specific format they need. If you're affiliated with a university, you probably have free access to the library with full text of millions of research articles.
The library will have subscribed to these journals on your behalf. The smartest thing you can do to access research articles is to familiarize yourself with your own library.
