Due to my line of work, I find myself having to use both these services frequently, despite avoiding google as much as I can. I see a lot of alternatives out there for internet searching, but when it comes to specific fields, alternatives tend to be scarce.
searxng has a scholar tab
In my experience, best with science, math, and technology stuff:
But I’ve found it to be very good for finding scientific articles.
I dont know about patents, but you can check out https://www.semanticscholar.org/ which works well in my experience.
I use JabRef for both finding research papers and generating bibliographies. It’s phenomenal and fully open source. Definitely worth checking out, I’m not even sure what I’d do without it these days!
I tried it, but didn’t find a way to search for articles. it seems closer to zotero than scholar. Am I missing something?
In the top left there should be a search option. In
settingspreferences, be sure it’s set up to search all sources. I get tons of articles when putting in pretty specific topics.Edit: It’s in the preferences under the file tab. Here’s screenshots of my home screen, plus the preferences I use for it to search papers.
Thank you very much!
@shreddy_scientist @nossaquesapao I shared the academic Internet archive recently, which is pretty good. A JabRef dev commented on adding it to the JabRef search resources. I need to start using JabRef to help begin the move away from Google scholar but that’s very difficult to do as an academic.
It is not nearly as easy to use as Google, but you can use the Patent & Trademark Offices website to search patents:
Patents seems to be the hardest one to find alternatives. The thing with google patents is that it searches from multiple databases, from multiple countries, so we don’t need to look for each source.
I used to litigate patents, and for international searches I have not found an adequate substitute. Depending on why you are searching, searching may be inadvisable anyway, at least in the U.S. if your search uncovers a specific patent (or even arguably should have uncovered a specific patent) and you are later sued by the rights holder for infringement, your actual knowledge of the patent can be used against you to show willful infringement, a damage multiplier. Apparently, companies that know about a patent need to hire competent legal counsel to analyze the patent with respect to their products and give them an opinion on possible infringement. That process can be quite expensive, so it is often better to not search in the first place. I wrote a few opinions over the years, but it was not a common activity. Accusations of willful infringement were pretty common in litigation though, probably about 40% of my cases.
Just writing this quick summary makes me glad I retired from practicing law.
Also, you are not my client, this is not legal advice, I might be a fraud, yadda yadda yadda.
Thank you for the tip. In my case, I’m working with technology prospecting, and we use patents as a source of information on what kinds of new technologies to expect, what technologies are about to become public domain, etc. It’s not something that can violate any IP.
I’ve used Elicit for finding academic articles if that’s what you’re looking for.
There’s https://scholar.archive.org/
https://openalex.org/ helps sometimes
PubMed instead of Google Scholar, would have to use specific search operatives to find what you need though. Also Elicit.org is a site that uses AI to find articles and break them down a little. I think with a free account you can get like x amount of searches, so may or may not be feasible for you. There’s also Scopus and Web of Science, but I have no experience using those.
I used to have access to scopus and web of science from my university, but I don’t have anymore, so I ended up using scholar, but looking for alternatives.
Elicit looks interesting, but I see that it requires a login, and has a bit weird privacy policy. I will check it in more detail, thanks.
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