BASE Academic Search Engine

I don’t think we’ve yet talked about the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) here on Slaw. A structure of the University of Bielefeld in Germany, BASE boasts that it indexes the metadata of 50,072,862 documents from 2,699 content sources (and keeps adding data at a great rate). Of course, the database ranges across all fields of academic endeavour — but that includes law and law-related material, which might be of use in certain situations. Much of the material referenced in BASE is open access and identified as such by the search engine.

You can either browse the database or use the search function. Browsing might be a bit daunting if it weren’t for the fact that the indexed documents are tagged using the Dewey Decimal system. Searching, however, is very well supported. All the usual options are available. And, because the sources are global, you can elect to have your search terms translated into all of the 21 languages that are included in the Eurovoc Thesaurus (itself a valuable resource to know about).

[hat tip: Stephane Cottin / ‏@cottinstef]