Alternatives to Google Scholar

Google's free search engine for scholarly articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.

  • Google Scholar

    Google's free search engine for scholarly articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

Replacements

Listings that take over the same core job as Google Scholar.

  • Semantic Scholar

    A free, AI-powered search engine for scientific literature covering papers from all fields of science.

    FreeProprietaryWebBrowser extension

    Semantic Scholar is a free AI-powered search over more than 238 million science papers, with a public API and browser extension, but it does not cover case law.

  • CORE

    A search engine and database aggregating hundreds of millions of open access research papers.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

    CORE is a not-for-profit search engine of open access papers with full text, APIs and datasets, but it is limited to open access content.

  • The Lens

    A search and analysis platform for patents and scholarly literature, with charts and collections.

    FreemiumProprietaryWeb

    The Lens searches patents alongside scholarly literature and adds charts, shareable collections and API access, with some features requiring a subscription.

  • Open Knowledge Maps

    A nonprofit visual search engine that builds topic maps of research literature.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

    Open Knowledge Maps is a free nonprofit visual search engine that builds topic maps of research from metadata, suited to exploring unfamiliar topics.

Similar software

Related functionality, not a direct replacement.

  • ResearchRabbit

    A web tool for literature reviews that finds related papers and builds citation maps.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

  • Litmaps

    A literature review tool that maps citation networks around seed papers to find related research.

    FreemiumProprietaryWeb

  • Inciteful

    A free web tool that uses citation graphs to find related academic papers and connect two papers.

    FreeProprietaryWeb

  • Elicit

    An AI research assistant that finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews.

    FreemiumProprietaryWeb

  • Scite

    An AI research tool that answers questions from scholarly articles and shows how claims are cited.

    FreemiumProprietaryWebBrowser extension

  • Paperlib

    An open-source desktop app for organizing academic papers, scraping their metadata and exporting references.

    FreeOpen sourceWindowsmacOSLinux