Academic Search
Six groups, organised by what you are actually looking for: foreign literature, Chinese literature, book search, vertical search, patent search and encyclopaedias — the largest set of links on the site. The foreign group keeps abstract indexes and full-text libraries side by side: Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, 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 Open Access Button, DOAJ, 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.
