There are search engines for everything, it seems, including scholarly research. Search engines for scholarly research have their own set of advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
Disadvantages
Academic search engines are good for getting an overview of a topic and if you don't have access to resources available through subscription, then they're great. If you do have access to resources available through subscription, you should use them instead.
Google Scholar is to academic search engines as Google is to regular search engines; it's Google applied to scholarly research. As of January 2018, it covered 348 million articles, and so probably has a few more than that now. Google Scholar uses the Google search interface so it's easy to use. If full text is available, then it's well signposted. Quality can be a bit inconsistent at times however (see the Open Access Publishers page)
The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is hosted by Bielefeld University in Germany and covers only open access material. The good news is that the majority of indexed material should be available as full text, the bad news is BASE covers fewer articles than Google Scholar, but still contains nearly 400 million articles
A little complicated perhaps, but this site aims to be a visual interface for the world's scientific knowledge. In practice that means creating maps from search results that give cluster together similar papers by topic and so help to identify key concepts in a field. It uses the BASE search engine, so many items are full text
CORE is similar to BASE but contains fewer items but similar amount of full text articles mostly from open access sources
Dimensions offers a nice interface with lots of options to refine your search, one of which is open or closed access. (Free) registration required
A research tool for scientific literature powered by artificial intelligence (not ChatGPT or anything like that, so it's more reliable) to try to provide more relevant and impactful search results and tease out hidden connections and links between research topics
Other academic search engines are available - see the links and resources page for other resources
