Every Hour in the Library, Saves a Week in the Lab

Why spend a day in the library when you can learn the same thing by working in the laboratory for a month?

– Frank Henry Westheimer

This aphorism is more applicable today that it was 50 years ago, and the primary change is that the library is now in the ‘cloud’ and library research is primarily done with search engines. The academic search engines I recommend are listed below.

• Scopus (for Academic Subscription holders – at ASU)
• Google Scholar (academic search engine)
• BASE (open access)
• CORE (open access research papers)
• Semantic Scholar (A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature)

These search engines should be paired with a bibliography or citation manager that allows all important research papers found using a search engine to be stored, browsed, research and cited/referenced in any future manuscript or report. My recommendations are listed below.

• Zotero (open access, freely available)
• Mendeley (open access, freely available)
• Endnote (paid software)