Where do you seek data for your dissertation or research assignments? If you are like all other college students, your search must have started and ended at Google. Well, there is no doubt that Google has dominated all search engines for almost two decades now. Unfortunately, it is not one of those research tools that you can use for educational purposes or for dissertation writing. Scholarly documents like theses and dissertations require information to be taken from credible and authentic tools. So, you must know about the best tools that are only for educational research purposes and contain credible authentic information.
Do you know what those research tools are? Most probably not, because if you knew about those tools, you would not be here reading this article. However, you have come to the right place. In today’s post, we are going to discuss the top 5 and the best tools that, as a student, you should know about. So, let’s get started with the topic straight away.
Top 5 and the best educational research tools
Research tools are the devices and instruments that are used to collect information about something. They are used to collect information to answer the research questions. Although there are many tools available in the market that claim to be the best, only a few are the best in actuality. Hence, a brief description of those best tools is as follows:
1. Google Scholar – The most used tool
Students love everything that comes from Google due to its intuitive design and page after page of results. Google Scholar is a tool by Google that is specially designed for students who look for credible and authentic data on a number of topics. This research tool offers access to a number of academic sources when you enter it. All you need to do is to enter the keyword of your research topic or the whole topic. It will show you thousands of results within minutes. It is such a big research tool that Google Scholar is home to more than 100 million papers.
2. Microsoft Academic – A product of tech-giant Microsoft
The top alternative and the best competitor of Google Scholar is Microsoft’s Microsoft Academic. Following a disappointing run in 2012, Microsoft relaunched this tool in 2016 with more functions and added academic sources. The new 2.0 version of this one of the amazing research tools takes the actual meaning of the words into account rather than searching for the results based on keywords. This is so rich in academic sources that, recently, it has been reported to cover more than 225 million research publications. Hence, after Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic should be your next stop.
3. Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC)
The educational resources information center (ERIC) is an online digital library that includes about 1.3 million scholarly publications. This library is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences in the United States. The peer-reviewed research articles and papers mostly dominate this tool. However, it also provides access to most non-journal academic documents. The examples of which are as follows:
- Books
- Conference presentations
- Reports of state standards etc.
Most of the information that you can avail of using this research tool dates back to the 1960s. So, it is a good tool for classic or old literature. If you find it difficult to navigate this tool, you can go to research proposal help services online.
4. ResearchGate
Since its establishment in 2008 by two scientists, ResearchGate has taken the internet by storm both as a social networking platform and a tool for academic articles and papers. Trusted by over 20 million researchers worldwide, ResearchGate is home to more than 135 million publications on almost every subject. The New York Times describes this one of the excellent research tools as a mashup of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Its social platform allows researchers from around the world to interact with each other, have a chat, and discuss their queries. Hence, it is another good tool for academic research.
5. Semantic Scholar -Pretty new but effective tool
Semantic scholar is a relatively new research tool as compared to the others mentioned above. However, the base of this tool, which is AI and Machine Learning, makes it one of the most effective research tools in the market. It has a natural language processing ability, which means that this tool does not rely on keywords and takes the actual meaning of things into consideration. As far as the number of scholarly documents on this website is concerned, it is home to more than 206 million documents.
Conclusion
Conclusively, the above discussed are the top 5 and the best research tools you must know. So, now whenever you go for research purposes on the internet, do not settle on any tool other than these. All these tools will give you access to the most credible and authentic academic information. Hence, Happy Researching.
