Thanks to everyone who has contributed to expanding other people’s knowledge on this topic. Information literacy is a huge topic in high schools and universities, and one of the things teachers and librarians are struggling to help students understand is the fact that their search engine is not free of bias and may prioritize ads (or what it thinks you want to see based on your shopping experience) rather than actual information. It’s made more difficult by the fact that the technology in use is constantly evolving.
Also, big thanks to the folks who reminded me to fix the ref links in the original post. Not sure what I was thinking when I copied it over from FB, but it’s now fixed (can’t vouch for reblogs, this is Tumblr afterall).
Someone accurately noted that the bulk of the above links are databases, not search engines. The initial post called them research sites not search engines. If you want something better than Google, I would usually suggest using Duck Duck Go. Someone in the comments said it skews right, but I have not seen research or evidence to back that up, so proceed as you wish. I would recommend Firefox as a browser, and you could consider one of these search engines.
https://www.qwant.com/ - Search engine with no tracking or advertising
https://www.ecosia.org/ - Search engine that plants trees – has ads and that ad revenue runs the engine while funding tree planting
Additional Sites Recommended in the Comments
Here are some of the top sites recommended in the comments.
https://eric.ed.gov/ - Education Resources Information Center, a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, Internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.
https://www.jstor.org/ - academic digital library providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ - the National Institute for Health’s National Library of Medicine, PubMed comprises more than 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
https://www.researchgate.net/ - founded to address the problems in the way science is created and shared. Connects the world of science and makes research open to all.
https://www.academia.edu/ - platform that shares academic research
https://www.sci-hub.st/ - research publication library – technically pirated content, but please note that the researchers do not get paid for publication, and will often send you a PDF of their research for free if you ask, it’s the publications that want to restrict access to paying readers
https://www.hathitrust.org/ – free digitized books from all over the world
https://z-lib.org/ – digital library providing ebooks for free
https://www.bpl.org/resources/history-and-political-science/ - History and Poli Sci at the Boston Library
https://www.gutenberg.org/ - free digital books, focused on works with expired US copyright – note, if you look for out of print books on Google, it will try to SELL you books that you can actually download FREE from Gutenberg (I’ve tested this multiple times)
https://archive.org/ - Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Please visit my Resources for Writers page for other subject areas.
