Base. Search engine for academic publications

Last updated on 12 May 2026

BASE is a valuable resource. BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is theone of the world's most powerful search engines for academic publications and research papers. A great tool for finding open access academic web resources and research papers. But also hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles, pre-publications, digital collections, … images/videos

BASE is reminiscent of CORE, another index of open access research documents. It even exceeds it by the number of indexed documents and by advanced functions that make it easier to watch and search.

A high-quality search engine for academic publications

This tool set up and animated by the Library of the University of Bielefeld is absolutely unbelievable. His index finger is gigantic. 272 million documents from around 9000 trusted sources. All within a click of a button.

BASE makes it possible to carry out academic research effective and targeted and achieve academically relevant results. Unlike search engines such as Google or Bing, BASE also performs searches on the deep web. Content providers that are included in BASE were selected manually (by people in the BASE team) and reviewed one by one. That makes a difference.

Very practical advanced search functions

Base works like a classic search engine. Simply enter your query on the home screen. The results are displayed very quickly. Each result displays the title of the document, the author, a description, the year of publication and the source? Base indexes only the metadata (title, name of authors, summary, etc.) of the documents. It is therefore not possible to search for the full text of the indexed documents.

From the search results you will be able to refine your request with powerful filters. You can also use the Advanced Search tab from the start by clicking on the dedicated tab. Advanced search is very powerful. The types of sorting are sufficiently numerous and varied to allow you not to have a large number of results but rather to have relevant results.

Note that the search engine also allows you to create an Rss thread from a query. This is extremely convenient for installing automatic monitoring on a research area. (Thanks to Christophe Deschamps from the excellent blog Tools Froids This was pointed out to me in a commentary).

Base is a great research tool for researchers, teachers and of course your students.