Searching Academic Databases

Search PubMed, CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, arXiv and more at once, then open PDFs and add papers to your library.

Sciwand can search many academic databases at once. Each search is saved as an item in the left sidebar, so you can name it, revisit it, and re-run it later.

Creating and running a search

  1. In the left sidebar, switch to Search and click + New Search.
  2. Give the search a name and press Enter - it appears in your Searches list.
  3. Click it to open the search panel, then click Edit.
  4. Type your query in the Search scientific databases... box.
  5. Choose which databases to search using the provider chips (see below); you can change the selection before or after typing.
  6. (Optional) set results per page, Hide duplicates, or caching.
  7. Click Search.

Results from all selected databases are merged into one list, and the query and database selection are saved on the sidebar item for next time.

Databases

Pick databases with the chips in the edit panel. A starter set is pre-selected (PubMed, CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, arXiv, Europe PMC); toggle any chip to add or remove a source.

  • PubMed - 35M+ biomedical citations (MEDLINE and life-science journals).
  • CrossRef - 150M+ scholarly records from publishers worldwide.
  • Semantic Scholar - AI-powered search with citation graphs and open-access PDFs.
  • OpenAlex - 250M+ scholarly works, authors, and institutions.
  • arXiv - 2.4M+ open-access preprints in physics, math, CS, and more.
  • Europe PMC - open-access life-sciences literature and full text.
  • Google Scholar - broad academic search (uses scraping; may be rate-limited).
  • CORE - aggregated open-access papers from thousands of repositories.
  • Google Books - books and publications.
  • Library of Congress - historical documents, manuscripts, and maps.

Working with results

Each result shows its title, authors, year, journal, abstract, and citation count. From a result you can:

  • Open the PDF - click the source icon. Sciwand tries several sources to find a full-text PDF and caches it locally. A green globe means a PDF was found online but could not be downloaded automatically - click it to open in your browser.
  • Open the details panel - click a result to open the smart sidebar with the abstract, references, citing papers, and citation graph.
  • Favorite - click the star to keep a result.
  • Add to your library - copy selected results into one of your collections.
  • Filter - narrow the visible results by title, author, year, abstract, or a custom column.

AI analysis of results

Add AI columns to score, classify, or summarize every result - for example a relevance score from 1 to 10, or a yes/no inclusion decision for a literature review.

Higher rate limits and CAPTCHAs

Some sources (notably Semantic Scholar) have public rate limits. Add a free Semantic Scholar API key in Advanced settings to raise your quota. If Google Scholar shows a CAPTCHA while fetching a PDF, Sciwand can prompt you to solve it (configurable in Advanced settings).