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The top list of academic search engines

1. Google Scholar

4. science.gov, 5. semantic scholar, 6. baidu scholar, get the most out of academic search engines, frequently asked questions about academic search engines, related articles.

Academic search engines have become the number one resource to turn to in order to find research papers and other scholarly sources. While classic academic databases like Web of Science and Scopus are locked behind paywalls, Google Scholar and others can be accessed free of charge. In order to help you get your research done fast, we have compiled the top list of free academic search engines.

Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only lets you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free but also often provides links to full-text PDF files.

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles
• Abstracts: only a snippet of the abstract is available
• Related articles: ✔
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Links to full text: ✔
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, RIS, BibTeX

BASE is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany. That is also where its name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles (contains duplicates)
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✘
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open-access research papers. For each search result, a link to the full-text PDF or full-text web page is provided.

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles
• Links to full text: ✔ (all articles in CORE are open access)
• Export formats: BibTeX

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need anymore to query all those resources separately!

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles and reports
• Links to full text: ✔ (available for some databases)
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX (available for some databases)

Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. Its mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI-powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.

• Coverage: approx. 40 million articles
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX

Although Baidu Scholar's interface is in Chinese, its index contains research papers in English as well as Chinese.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 100 million articles
• Abstracts: only snippets of the abstract are available
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX

RefSeek searches more than one billion documents from academic and organizational websites. Its clean interface makes it especially easy to use for students and new researchers.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 1 billion documents
• Abstracts: only snippets of the article are available
• Export formats: not available

Consider using a reference manager like Paperpile to save, organize, and cite your references. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons:

Google Scholar is an academic search engine, and it is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only let's you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free, but also often provides links to full text PDF file.

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI. Sematic Scholar was publicly released in 2015 and uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

BASE , as its name suggest is an academic search engine. It is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany and that's where it name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers. For each search result a link to the full text PDF or full text web page is provided.

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

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• Calculate you time right. You'll never be able to finish a task overnight, so don't attempt to make a worthy writing when the deadline is tomorrow. Usually the task to write a paper is given long before the actual deadline.
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Science for Living: Sybil Crawford clarifies research on menopause hormone therapy and disease prevention

By Susan E.W. Spencer

Other interventions were also analyzed and little impact on prevention was found. The study didn’t find evidence that routine supplementation with calcium plus vitamin D prevented fractures, or that a low-fat diet high in fruits, vegetables and grains prevented breast or colorectal cancer. However, a low-fat diet may help reduce breast cancer mortality, which researchers are studying further.

How did we get here? Conflicting research findings on menopause has given midlife and older women whiplash over the past few decades.

Now, long-term data from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) and a longitudinal, epidemiologic study of women in their middle years and older, called the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation or SWAN , are providing more guidance for women’s health throughout the post-reproductive lifespan, according to Sybil Crawford, PhD, professor of nursing. Dr. Crawford has conducted extensive research focused on menopause for 30 years and leads a statistical team for the SWAN study.

A generation ago, hormone replacement therapy was considered the cure-all for menopause symptoms such as hot flashes, disrupted sleep and brain fog, and some studies suggested it could also prevent a number of chronic diseases, including heart disease, dementia and some cancers.

“Before the Women’s Health Initiative, physicians were relying on observational studies of exogenous hormones, which found that in younger woman who were having symptoms and using it, it worked great,” said Crawford. “But two things make that not generally applicable. These women were younger and they tended to be healthier before they started hormones.”

  “I’ve been reading in the news, ‘We don’t have information on menopause’, but we’ve been doing the research and trying to get it out there.”  

The WHI was designed to test, through randomized clinical trials as well as observation, the risks and benefits of hormone therapy—either a combination of estrogen and progesterone or estrogen alone—in addressing menopause symptoms and disease prevention. Nearly 162,000 women aged 50 to 79 were enrolled between 1993 and 1998, with 68,000 randomized in clinical trials and followed for up to 20 years.

In 2002, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute stopped the hormone therapy trial three years early based on an evaluation that the risks of breast cancer and heart disease were increased, and other health risks of hormone therapy were greater than the benefits. The use of hormone treatments plummeted, Crawford said.

Further analyses looked at the WHI population by age group, not just as a whole, and found that hormone therapy was safe and effective for treating perimenopause and menopause symptoms in women younger than 60 or within 10 years of their last menstrual period. That recommendation still holds.

But hormone therapy may not be effective for many other uses. Crawford said the most recent study supported previous analyses that hormone therapy does not prevent cardiovascular disease, cancer or other chronic diseases in postmenopausal women.

So, what’s a peri- or postmenopausal woman to do to stay healthy? Crawford said the SWAN study, which follows a racially and ethnically diverse population of approximately 3,300 women who were 42 to 52 years old when enrolled between 1996 and 1997, has fact sheets with tips for several women’s health topics on its website, swanstudy.org .

“A lot happens during this age period. It’s not just going through menopause,” Crawford said. “There are so many other factors going on in women’s lives. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to staying healthy, following what the American Heart Association calls ‘Life’s Essential 8 .’”

Whether or not to use hormone therapy in early menopause depends on individual factors a woman should discuss with her health care provider. A directory of practitioners who specialize in menopause can be found on The Menopause Society website, according to Crawford. Some endocrinologists also specialize in menopause.

“I’ve been reading in the news, ‘We don’t have information on menopause,’” said Crawford. “But we’ve been doing the research and trying to get it out there.”

Science for Living  stories feature the perspectives of UMass Chan Medical School experts on the research behind health news headlines. If you have ideas for topics  you ’d  like to see explored, reach out to   [email protected] .

Related UMass Chan news

Umass chan study finds some women may be missing out on benefits of menopausal hormone therapy, sybil crawford receives 2020 best paper award from north american menopause society.

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When A.I.’s Output Is a Threat to A.I. Itself

As A.I.-generated data becomes harder to detect, it’s increasingly likely to be ingested by future A.I., leading to worse results.

By Aatish Bhatia

Aatish Bhatia interviewed A.I. researchers, studied research papers and fed an A.I. system its own output.

The internet is becoming awash in words and images generated by artificial intelligence.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, wrote in February that the company generated about 100 billion words per day — a million novels’ worth of text, every day, an unknown share of which finds its way onto the internet.

A.I.-generated text may show up as a restaurant review, a dating profile or a social media post. And it may show up as a news article, too: NewsGuard, a group that tracks online misinformation, recently identified over a thousand websites that churn out error-prone A.I.-generated news articles .

In reality, with no foolproof methods to detect this kind of content, much will simply remain undetected.

All this A.I.-generated information can make it harder for us to know what’s real. And it also poses a problem for A.I. companies. As they trawl the web for new data to train their next models on — an increasingly challenging task — they’re likely to ingest some of their own A.I.-generated content, creating an unintentional feedback loop in which what was once the output from one A.I. becomes the input for another.

In the long run, this cycle may pose a threat to A.I. itself. Research has shown that when generative A.I. is trained on a lot of its own output, it can get a lot worse.

Here’s a simple illustration of what happens when an A.I. system is trained on its own output, over and over again:

This is part of a data set of 60,000 handwritten digits.

When we trained an A.I. to mimic those digits, its output looked like this.

This new set was made by an A.I. trained on the previous A.I.-generated digits. What happens if this process continues?

After 20 generations of training new A.I.s on their predecessors’ output, the digits blur and start to erode.

After 30 generations, they converge into a single shape.

While this is a simplified example, it illustrates a problem on the horizon.

Imagine a medical-advice chatbot that lists fewer diseases that match your symptoms, because it was trained on a narrower spectrum of medical knowledge generated by previous chatbots. Or an A.I. history tutor that ingests A.I.-generated propaganda and can no longer separate fact from fiction.

Just as a copy of a copy can drift away from the original, when generative A.I. is trained on its own content, its output can also drift away from reality, growing further apart from the original data that it was intended to imitate.

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature, a group of researchers in Britain and Canada showed how this process results in a narrower range of A.I. output over time — an early stage of what they called “model collapse.”

The eroding digits we just saw show this collapse. When untethered from human input, the A.I. output dropped in quality (the digits became blurry) and in diversity (they grew similar).

How an A.I. that draws digits “collapses” after being trained on its own output

If only some of the training data were A.I.-generated, the decline would be slower or more subtle. But it would still occur, researchers say, unless the synthetic data was complemented with a lot of new, real data.

Degenerative A.I.

In one example, the researchers trained a large language model on its own sentences over and over again, asking it to complete the same prompt after each round.

When they asked the A.I. to complete a sentence that started with “To cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, you…,” at first, it responded like this:

Initial A.I. output

Even at the outset, the A.I. “hallucinates.” But when the researchers further trained it on its own sentences, it got a lot worse…

After two generations, it started simply printing long lists.

And after four generations, it began to repeat phrases incoherently.

“The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality,” the researchers wrote of this phenomenon.

This problem isn’t just confined to text. Another team of researchers at Rice University studied what would happen when the kinds of A.I. that generate images are repeatedly trained on their own output — a problem that could already be occurring as A.I.-generated images flood the web.

They found that glitches and image artifacts started to build up in the A.I.’s output, eventually producing distorted images with wrinkled patterns and mangled fingers.

When A.I. image models are trained on their own output, they can produce distorted images, mangled fingers or strange patterns.

A.I.-generated images by Sina Alemohammad and others .

“You’re kind of drifting into parts of the space that are like a no-fly zone,” said Richard Baraniuk , a professor who led the research on A.I. image models.

The researchers found that the only way to stave off this problem was to ensure that the A.I. was also trained on a sufficient supply of new, real data.

While selfies are certainly not in short supply on the internet, there could be categories of images where A.I. output outnumbers genuine data, they said.

For example, A.I.-generated images in the style of van Gogh could outnumber actual photographs of van Gogh paintings in A.I.’s training data, and this may lead to errors and distortions down the road. (Early signs of this problem will be hard to detect because the leading A.I. models are closed to outside scrutiny, the researchers said.)

Why collapse happens

All of these problems arise because A.I.-generated data is often a poor substitute for the real thing.

This is sometimes easy to see, like when chatbots state absurd facts or when A.I.-generated hands have too many fingers.

But the differences that lead to model collapse aren’t necessarily obvious — and they can be difficult to detect.

When generative A.I. is “trained” on vast amounts of data, what’s really happening under the hood is that it is assembling a statistical distribution — a set of probabilities that predicts the next word in a sentence, or the pixels in a picture.

For example, when we trained an A.I. to imitate handwritten digits, its output could be arranged into a statistical distribution that looks like this:

Distribution of A.I.-generated data

Examples of initial A.I. output:

The distribution shown here is simplified for clarity.

The peak of this bell-shaped curve represents the most probable A.I. output — in this case, the most typical A.I.-generated digits. The tail ends describe output that is less common.

Notice that when the model was trained on human data, it had a healthy spread of possible outputs, which you can see in the width of the curve above.

But after it was trained on its own output, this is what happened to the curve:

Distribution of A.I.-generated data when trained on its own output

It gets taller and narrower. As a result, the model becomes more and more likely to produce a smaller range of output, and the output can drift away from the original data.

Meanwhile, the tail ends of the curve — which contain the rare, unusual or surprising outcomes — fade away.

This is a telltale sign of model collapse: Rare data becomes even rarer.

If this process went unchecked, the curve would eventually become a spike:

This was when all of the digits became identical, and the model completely collapsed.

Why it matters

This doesn’t mean generative A.I. will grind to a halt anytime soon.

The companies that make these tools are aware of these problems, and they will notice if their A.I. systems start to deteriorate in quality.

But it may slow things down. As existing sources of data dry up or become contaminated with A.I. “ slop ,” researchers say it makes it harder for newcomers to compete.

A.I.-generated words and images are already beginning to flood social media and the wider web . They’re even hiding in some of the data sets used to train A.I., the Rice researchers found .

“The web is becoming increasingly a dangerous place to look for your data,” said Sina Alemohammad , a graduate student at Rice who studied how A.I. contamination affects image models.

Big players will be affected, too. Computer scientists at N.Y.U. found that when there is a lot of A.I.-generated content in the training data, it takes more computing power to train A.I. — which translates into more energy and more money.

“Models won’t scale anymore as they should be scaling,” said ​​ Julia Kempe , the N.Y.U. professor who led this work.

The leading A.I. models already cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to train, and they consume staggering amounts of energy , so this can be a sizable problem.

‘A hidden danger’

Finally, there’s another threat posed by even the early stages of collapse: an erosion of diversity.

And it’s an outcome that could become more likely as companies try to avoid the glitches and “ hallucinations ” that often occur with A.I. data.

This is easiest to see when the data matches a form of diversity that we can visually recognize — people’s faces:

A.I. images generated by Sina Alemohammad and others .

This set of A.I. faces was created by the same Rice researchers who produced the distorted faces above. This time, they tweaked the model to avoid visual glitches.

This is the output after they trained a new A.I. on the previous set of faces. At first glance, it may seem like the model changes worked: The glitches are gone.

After two generations …

After three generations …

After four generations, the faces all appeared to converge.

This drop in diversity is “a hidden danger,” Mr. Alemohammad said. “You might just ignore it and then you don’t understand it until it's too late.”

Just as with the digits, the changes are clearest when most of the data is A.I.-generated. With a more realistic mix of real and synthetic data, the decline would be more gradual.

But the problem is relevant to the real world, the researchers said, and will inevitably occur unless A.I. companies go out of their way to avoid their own output.

Related research shows that when A.I. language models are trained on their own words, their vocabulary shrinks and their sentences become less varied in their grammatical structure — a loss of “ linguistic diversity .”

And studies have found that this process can amplify biases in the data and is more likely to erase data pertaining to minorities .

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of this research is that high-quality, diverse data is valuable and hard for computers to emulate.

One solution, then, is for A.I. companies to pay for this data instead of scooping it up from the internet , ensuring both human origin and high quality.

OpenAI and Google have made deals with some publishers or websites to use their data to improve A.I. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft last year, alleging copyright infringement. OpenAI and Microsoft say their use of the content is considered fair use under copyright law.)

Better ways to detect A.I. output would also help mitigate these problems.

Google and OpenAI are working on A.I. “ watermarking ” tools, which introduce hidden patterns that can be used to identify A.I.-generated images and text.

But watermarking text is challenging , researchers say, because these watermarks can’t always be reliably detected and can easily be subverted (they may not survive being translated into another language, for example).

A.I. slop is not the only reason that companies may need to be wary of synthetic data. Another problem is that there are only so many words on the internet.

Some experts estimate that the largest A.I. models have been trained on a few percent of the available pool of text on the internet. They project that these models may run out of public data to sustain their current pace of growth within a decade.

“These models are so enormous that the entire internet of images or conversations is somehow close to being not enough,” Professor Baraniuk said.

To meet their growing data needs, some companies are considering using today’s A.I. models to generate data to train tomorrow’s models . But researchers say this can lead to unintended consequences (such as the drop in quality or diversity that we saw above).

There are certain contexts where synthetic data can help A.I.s learn — for example, when output from a larger A.I. model is used to train a smaller one, or when the correct answer can be verified, like the solution to a math problem or the best strategies in games like chess or Go .

And new research suggests that when humans curate synthetic data (for example, by ranking A.I. answers and choosing the best one), it can alleviate some of the problems of collapse.

Companies are already spending a lot on curating data, Professor Kempe said, and she believes this will become even more important as they learn about the problems of synthetic data.

But for now, there’s no replacement for the real thing.

About the data

To produce the images of A.I.-generated digits, we followed a procedure outlined by researchers . We first trained a type of a neural network known as a variational autoencoder using a standard data set of 60,000 handwritten digits .

We then trained a new neural network using only the A.I.-generated digits produced by the previous neural network, and repeated this process in a loop 30 times.

To create the statistical distributions of A.I. output, we used each generation’s neural network to create 10,000 drawings of digits. We then used the first neural network (the one that was trained on the original handwritten digits) to encode these drawings as a set of numbers, known as a “ latent space ” encoding. This allowed us to quantitatively compare the output of different generations of neural networks. For simplicity, we used the average value of this latent space encoding to generate the statistical distributions shown in the article.

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