Google scholar

Google are always looking for ways of developing new products. Their latest which is still in beta testing is Google Scholar.

"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

This is really useful in that it enables you to search specifically for academic sources and references. This deals, at least partly, with the perennial problem of sorting out poor quality websites from good ones. At least with peer reviewed articles you know that a certain standard must have been obtained