Friday, 22 March 2013

Open Access Library - a new search engine for scholars

Open Access Library (OALIB) is working on a new search engine for all scholars worldwide with the ultimate aim of promoting academic exchange and advancement.

“Open Access Library search engine features free access to 263,388 academic articles. And this number is estimated to increase in the near future. Our mission is to provide free research articles to scholars around the world”

Photo by ell brown

No registration is required, so you can start using OALIB straight away. There is no advanced search feature but the interface is nonetheless easy to use and navigate.

OALIB can be searched using the following fields: title, keyword, abstract, author, all. Results appear to be ranked in order of relevance and can be limited by year – handy if you’re only interested in recently published research.

A free text search for “health utility value” in all fields gives 44801 results. The top result is an article by Steve Goodacre from the Health Services Research section of ScHARR (amongst other authors).

Unsurprisingly, OALIB is not sufficient for thorough and systematic research, but could be a good first port of call if you need to do some background research or require instant access to scholarly articles.

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