arXiv
arxiv.org
Free preprints in physics, maths, computer science and quantitative biology
No sign-up
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scholar.google.com
Searches academic papers and shows who has cited each one since.
The broadest index of scholarly literature there is, covering journals, conference proceedings, theses and preprints, with a citation count and a 'cited by' list that is the fastest way to walk forward in time from a key paper. The alternative-versions link often surfaces a free PDF on an author's own page when the publisher wants money. Its coverage decisions are opaque and it indexes some predatory journals alongside real ones.
Questions
Works the moment the page loads. No account, no email, no trial. No usable filters beyond date and no bulk export, and a large share of results still land on a publisher paywall.
Yes. Google Scholar sends your input to its own servers to process it. That is fine for public material; for anything containing personal data, use one of the on-device tools instead.
No usable filters beyond date and no bulk export, and a large share of results still land on a publisher paywall.
Alternatives
Same category or same task, ordered by how closely they overlap.
arxiv.org
Free preprints in physics, maths, computer science and quantitative biology
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The index of record for biomedical literature, run by the US National Library of Medicine
archive.ph
Freezes one page on demand into a snapshot that keeps working when it moves
printfriendly.com
Strips ads and navigation off a page so you can print or save it as a PDF
gutenberg.org
Seventy thousand out-of-copyright books as clean EPUB, Kindle and plain text
web.archive.org
Shows you what a web page looked like on a date in the past