Search engine BASE (Bifield Academic Search Engine)

BASE is one of the worlds largest search engines for scholarly web resources. BASE offers more than 350 million documents from more than 11,000 content providers. You can access the full text of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (open access). BASE is operated by the Bielefeld University Library.

We are indexing metadata of various scholarly related resources (journals, institutional repositories, digital collections, etc.) that offer an OAI interface and make their content available using OAI-PMH (see our Golden Rules for Repository Administrators).

The index is continuously enhanced by integrating more sources/content providers (become a content provider). We are developing new features, such as the author declaration service in the ORCID DE project.

BASE is a registered OAI service provider. Database administrators can integrate BASE indexes into their local infrastructure (e.g. metasearch engines, library catalogs). In addition, there are a variety of tools and services for users, database and repository administrators.

Compared to commercial search engines, BASE has the following features:

• Content providers are indexed only after being checked by qualified staff of Bielefeld University Library
• Only document servers and journals that meet certain academic quality and relevance requirements are included
• Our list of content providers provides search transparency
• Disclosure of "deep web" web resources that are ignored by commercial search engines or lost in the sea of ​​hits
• Correction, normalization and enrichment of metadata by automated methods
• Multilingual search (search terms are found in more than 20 translated languages)
• Search results display includes precise bibliographic data
• Display of access and reuse terms of documents
• Several options for sorting the result list (by author, title, date)
• "Refine your search results" option (by author, subject, DDC, year of publication, content provider, language, document type, access and reuse terms)
• Browse by DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification), document type, access and reuse/license terms.