Special search engines for free full texts as well as open access tools
Picture by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay CC
Here we present special search engines for full text open access academic articles, open access tools, as well as a preprint repository for African Studies.
Many articles and even entire books are available online free of charge. However, the general search engines such as Google often fail to find academic documents, or they are lost in a large number of results. It is possible to conduct a targeted search with special search engines. These search only a certain part of the net, for example only scientific websites (with thanks to the FID Romance Studies).
Open-access tools can be used to find free versions of academic publications.
Search engines for preprints
– AfricArXiv A preprint repository for African Studies.
Search engines for articles
– BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine References to freely available electronic full texts in Germany and worldwide; references to full-text versions of digitalised sources, articles and dissertations; transparency of data sources. BASE is integrated into and searchable through the Internet library sub-Saharan Africa (ilissAfrica).
– e-Periodica is the ETH-Library’s platform for digitalised Swiss journals in the fields of science and culture. All journals on the platform are freely accessible.
– 1findr is a Canadian search engine for academic articles, some of which are freely available. 1findr also contains Altmetrics scores, which count mentions of the work on Twitter, in blogs or in the Mendeley reference database.
Search engines for books
– The OAIster provides access to millions of academic publications freely available online through WorldCat.
– The German Central Index of Digital Prints (ZVDD) is a central reference and access portal to digitalised library materials.
Open Access Tools
– The Open Access Button searches for Open Access versions of an article via the URL of the article. More information…
– With Unpaywall you can skip the paywall and get access to articles you are looking for. More information…
– The oaDOI (Open Access DOI) searches for the open access version of an article through the DOI of the document. More information…
