20 Useful Specialty Search Engines for College Students

1. Academic Index: Use this simple search engine to find topics in other search engines such as Infotopia, Infomine, Bielefeld Search Engine, Open Doar and Chabot College. Extend your search to encompass even more search engines previoiusly selected by librarians, teachers and library and educational consortia. This academic search engine was created by and is maintained by Dr. Michael Bell, former chair, Texas Association of School Librarians. He also created and maintains Infotopia.
2. BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
3. CiteSeerx: This is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeer was the first digital library and search engine to provide automated citation indexing and citation linking using the method of autonomous citation indexing.
4. Google Scholar Beta: From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
5. InfoMine: Search this virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. Librarians from the University of California, Wake Forest University, California State University, the University of Detroit – Mercy, and other universities and colleges have contributed to building InfoMine. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information.
6. ipl2: In January 2010, the website “ipl2: information you can trust” was launched, merging the collections of resources from the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII) websites. The site is hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science & Technology, and a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science are involved in developing and maintaining the ipl2.
7. iSeek: This is a targeted search engine that compiles hundreds of thousands of authoritative resources from university, government, and established noncommercial providers. It provides time-saving intelligent search and a personal Web-based library to help you locate the most relevant results immediately and find them quickly later.
8. refSeek: Currently in public beta, RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
9. Vadlo: This search engine holds the keys to everything scientific, including information about ELISA and other immunoassays, biomarkers, drug discovery and biotech high-throughput screening bioassays, clinical trials and R&D, RNA interference, microRNA, miRNA, shRNA, siRNA oligoneucleotide, real time multiplex PCR primers and more…