Even if you’ve not used Google Scholar before, you’ll know Google. And, thus, you can probably guess that Google Scholar is a search engine dedicated to academic work. Not everything listed on Google Scholar will be freely available in full. But it is a good place to start if you’re looking for a specific paper, and many papers can be downloaded for free.

Another dedicated academic search engine, BASE offers access to more than 140 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. Around 60% of these documents are open access, and you can filter results to see only research that is available for free online.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database that lists around 12,000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science, and the humanities.

PubMed is a search engine maintained by the NCBI, part of the United States National Library of Medicine. It provides access to more than 29 million citations of biomedical research from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. The NCBI runs a similar search engine for research in the chemical sciences called PubChem, too, which is also free to use.

CORE is an open research aggregator. This means it works as a search engine for open access research published by organizations from around the world, all of which is available for free. It is also the world’s largest open access aggregator, so it is a very useful resource for researchers!

Run by the British Library, EThOS is a database of over 500,000 doctoral theses. More than half of these are available for free, either directly via EThOS or via a link to a university website.

SSRN is a database for research from the social sciences and humanities, including 846,589 research papers from 426,107 researchers across 30 disciplines. Most of these are available for free, although you may need to sign up as a member (also free) to access some services.

Semantic Scholar is an “intelligent” academic search engine. It uses machine learning to prioritize the most important research, which can make it easier to find relevant literature. Or, in Semantic Scholar’s own words, it uses influential citations, images, and key phrases to “cut through the clutter.”

PLOS is an open-access research organization that publishes several journals. But as well as publishing its own research, PLOS is a dedicated advocate for open-access learning.

Z-Library is a shadow library and file-sharing project for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books. Z-Library says the project provides access to more than 6,754,720 books and 80,759,561 articles as of April 1, 2021

With PQDT Open, you can read the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge.

JSTOR helps students explore a wide range of scholarly content through a powerful research and teaching platform. JSTOR collaborates with the academic community to help libraries connect students and faculty to vital content while lowering costs and increasing shelf space, provide independent researchers with free and low-cost access to scholarship, and help publishers reach new audiences and preserve their content for future generations.

Started by a business student for business students, the primary goal of this site is to cut through the clutter of the Internet and tame information overload by bringing you the noteworthy, not the noise. Jeff Blum, an MBA graduate, regularly combs through loads of business publications and hand-picks the best articles so you can save valuable time while keeping up with the best management thinking.

Funded in part by the U.S. Department of Education Title VI B grant, globalEDGE delivers a comprehensive research tool for academics, students and businesspeople. Connect with over 47,000 people using the gE Network while tapping into a directory of over 5000 quality resources. globalEDGE provides tools and resources to efficiently research nearly any international business question you may have.

Investopedia is the world’s leading source of financial content on the web, ranging from market news to retirement strategies, investing education to insights from advisors.

The channels by which today’s scholars discover relevant content are varied and wide. In this increasingly complex environment, institutions are seeking strategies to make their students’ theses and dissertations as widely visible and cited as possible. With EBSCO Open Dissertations, institutions and students are offered an innovative approach to meeting these goals by driving additional traffic to ETDs in institutional repositories.

The United Nations iLibrary is the comprehensive global search, discovery, and viewing source for digital content created by the United Nations. Initially launched in 2015, the UN iLibrary was updated in December 2020 to incorporate new features such as an interface in all six official UN languages and a search feature by Sustainable Development Goals. 

BPubs.com is a directory-based Internet search engine that strives to cover the topic of Business Publications. By eliminating the noise of “homepages, index pages, and other extraneous website components”, our users are able to extract what they truly searching for – content. Our target audience of corporate and business users will become repeat visitors because we save them time finding the information they need.