12 Academic Search Engines

While browsing through the "12 Academic Search Engines," I noticed a few that were a lot similar and like search engines I have used in the past, but I also saw a few that I wish I knew about through high school and undergrad! Archival Research Catalogue, BASE, Eric, Refseek and The Virtual LRC are all pretty similar and like the search engines I'm used to. In BASE, when I searched "authors," it brought me to a lot of Wikibooks. I know I've always been told to never use Wiki anything since anyone can add information to it. Is it the same for Wikibooks? In Eric, I randomly searched "history of China," and it allows me to narrow the articles by date of publication, descriptor source, etc. Eric also has a thesaurus readily available. In "The Virtual LRC," it has a tab for "search tips" to help students with the process. There were engines I wish I had known of years ago such as "CiteULike," "Academic Info," "Google Scholar," "Infomine," and "Infotopia." What I liked about Academic Info was that there were so many topics and they were all very specific. Topics ranging from authors to wars to religions to geography to literally everything. If you know exactly what you're looking for, this is a great tool. Infotopia and Infomine were pretty similar in the sense that they had different categories to search from and then can search your topic from there. These two sites also had cool designs which could make searching for a topic potentially fun. Lib Guides Community was different from anything I've used, too. I couldn't figure out if it gave lib guides from libraries all around here or if they were libraries from around the country because there were so many to look at. Overall, I really enjoyed browsing through these search engines and will definitely be using some of them for my next papers and recommending them to my future students!