Together with books, scientific articles are the most important publication form in science. The most important search engines for articles are:
All search engines have their strong and weak points and each discipline has its own set of best search engines. Your search will be more efficient and your search results will be more complete if you take the trouble to get to know them. When exploring the coverage and opties of search engines use the system's help files but also tutorials and LibGuides available on the web or on our LibGuides homepage.
Another good way to find articles is by following the literature references and citations from and to earlier found articles.
In the LibGuide Search Strategy you will find more information.
Scopus is a large search engine containing some 50 million scientific journal articles and conference proceedings. Its most important features are:
Scopus has an excellent coverage for the medical and natural sciences, technics and geosciences. Also the social sciences are well represented. Humanities is less well covered, but we are still talking about millons of articles, absolutely speaking.
Scopus offers very good options to follow the network of citations between articles.
In the special LibGuide Scopus you will find detailed information about all the possiblilites and bonuses of Scopus.
Google Scholar is a large search engine for scholarly publications. It searches primarily journal articles and, contrary to almost all other search engines, searches the full text. From Google Books the data of a large number of scientific books are included in Google Scholar. Also in this respect Google Scholar differs from classical scientific search engines such as Scopus or Web of Science.
Google Scholar's special features listed:
In the special Google Scholar LibGuide you will find all you want to know about successfully using this remarkable search engine