Academic Search
Nine groups, organised by what you are actually looking for: foreign literature, Chinese literature, book search, vertical search, patent search and encyclopaedias, plus writing & submission, lab protocols and academic identity. The first six get the literature and background together; the last three cover what comes next — how to write it up, where to send it, how to actually run the experiment, and how colleagues find you — the stretch that directories usually skip. The foreign group keeps abstract indexes and full-text libraries side by side: Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus to scope a topic, then ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Wiley and IEEE once you know what you are after. arXiv and SSRN cover preprints, while CORE and Unpaywall exist for exactly one job — finding a legitimate free copy when a paywall is in the way; try that group before hunting for a mirror, and before giving up on the library proxy or interlibrary loan. The Chinese group centres on CNKI, Wanfang and VIP, with the national philosophy and social sciences centre for that field and the national science and technology library for theses and standards. Book search covers catalogues, holdings and public-domain texts: WorldCat and the Chinese union catalogue for editions and holdings, Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and Internet Archive for downloads, the Chinese Text Project for classical sources. Vertical search is where the time actually saves — WeChat articles, reverse image search, subtitles and legal texts all cost several engine pages otherwise. Patent search spans Google Patents, Espacenet, PATENTSCOPE and the Chinese office; run a novelty search on more than one, because indexing scope differs. The encyclopaedia group fills in background and terminology, where subject-specific entries are often more detailed than a general encyclopaedia. The writing & submission group breaks "getting it out" into steps: bioRxiv and medRxiv stake an early claim on life-science and medical results; journal choice runs through Journal Finder, JANE and LetPub, and a run through Think.Check.Submit before you submit is cheap insurance against predatory journals and fake conferences; SHERPA RoMEO tells you what a target journal allows on open access and self-archiving, which decides whether a preprint or the accepted manuscript can go into an institutional repository; Retraction Watch and PubPeer let you check a paper or an author for retractions and post-publication concerns before you cite them; and the writing side is Overleaf for collaborative LaTeX, Grammarly and DeepL Write for English, with Author Aid's guidance aimed at non-native speakers. The lab protocol group covers the gap between having the reagents and knowing what to do with them: protocols.io and Bio-protocol are itemised, citable protocol libraries, JoVE films protocols step by step, and the Cold Spring Harbor and Springer collections are the classic method compendia; when an experiment is beyond your bench, Science Exchange can outsource it to a certified lab. The academic identity & conferences group handles being found and knowing where to send work: ORCID is the persistent identifier that runs through submissions, grants and peer review, so register early and link your Web of Science ResearcherID and Scopus author profile to it — that is what stops a namesake's papers being credited to you; Google Scholar Profile aggregates citations and your h-index with almost no effort; Publons records your reviewing and editorial work, while Kudos and Mendeley help disseminate papers and keep a public record. For conferences, Conference Alerts delivers calls for papers by subject, MyHuiban is a Chinese-language deadline calendar, and EasyChair's CFP search doubles as the entry point to a common submission system — but before submitting anywhere, check that the venue is recognised in your field and be wary of pay-to-present events.
