Find Papers: A Simpler Way to Search

2023-02-05

TL;DR: Search dozens of academic sources from one input box with Find Papers. The code can be found here.

A big time sink for me during the early research phase of a project is searching the same terms across dozens of journals, conferences, and proceedings. Frustrated by this, I spent an afternoon putting together something to simplify the process.

Introducing Find Papers: a way to search dozens of academic sources from one input box.

The tool lets you toggle dozens of different sources from entire publishers to specific journals. You can also search Government publications and datasets, technical documentation, and University libraries. Just pick what you’re interested in, enter your query, and it will do the rest.

Despite the range of sources that the tool interacts with, the underlying code is surprisingly simple. When you click submit, your query is sent via DuckDuckGo, specifically their Bangs feature. This lets DuckDuckGo, and by extension Find Papers, interact with hundreds of sites across the web directly from the search box. It’s this feature that I’ve leveraged in Find Papers to fire off a query to the selected sources, letting you spend more time doing the work that matters.

I’ve been testing Find Papers out privately for some time now and have found it to become my go-to search engine for research. So visit Find Papers today and see how it benefits you. Oh, and it’s open source!