Wikipedia Alternatives: 47 Resources to Use for Research

The Open Directory Project is a humanly compiled Web directory of a variety of topics, anything from Arts to Health to Sports. Each link has been scrutinized for quality here by at least one pair of eyes, so you know it’s going to be good. More »

Open Library is an Internet Archive project aimed at compiling one Web page for every book ever published. To date, they have amassed over 20 million records, all of which are freely accessible. More »

FactBites offers searchers the ability to get comprehensive search results that actually address the context of their search queries, rather than just the keywords. For example, searching for “history of tornadoes” retrieves statistics, state by state information, and scientific background on some of the worst tornadoes documented. More »

Stumped on a legal term? You can find the definition in plain English at the NOLO Legal Dictionary, a free resource that provides easy to understand information on hundreds of commonly used legal words and phrases. More »

Put together by the University of Michigan library, the Government Documents Center is an exhaustive database of U.S. government statistics and factual documents. More »

3000 years of world history presented interactively via timelines, graphics, and maps. Click on the time period you’re interested in, and then use the menus on the left and the right to manipulate your data. More »

Search through comprehensive medical database at the Merck Medical Library, an exhaustive index of medical information culled from the Merck series of health resources for both medical professionals and laymen. More »

Library Spot is a reference utopia. You can browse a list of libraries online, newspapers, poetry, archives, maps, current events, dictionaries…you name it, you can probably find it at Library Spot. More »

Thousands of historical articles, links, and ebooks on historical topics ranging from Africa to World War II.More »

From the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health; searchable indexes of searches pre-forumulated with information, drug resources, medical encyclopedias, interactive tutorials, and current medical news. More »

The Library of Congress, one of the largest American cultural repositories, has placed their incredible collection of records online via the Library of Congress Online Catalog. According to the Library records, there are over 14 million documents here, including books, serials, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings, and visual materials.More »

Over 7000 articles related to anything mythology: Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Native American, and more. The mythology sections are divided into geographical regions, so you can search via country, plus, there are special gallery sections: heroes, genealogical information, and more.More »

If you want to research an auto, Edmunds is the place to do it. You can find information here on both new and used cars, car reviews, industry news, auto shows, local car dealerships, glossary of terms, and savvy auto advice. More »

If you need to know about a computer or technology related term, you can find it at Webopedia. More »

Anything you want to know about nearly any country or region in the world, you’ll be able to find it at the CIA World Factbook. This amazing resource offers you information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 different countries, along with maps, flags, and country comparisons. More »

Need to know about a legal issue? You can use FindLaw to do some initial research on anything legal-related, as well as find a lawyer in your local area and interact with the FindLaw legal community. More »

The ipl2, aka Internet Public Library 2, is the result of a merger between the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII). It’s a human-edited selection of high quality resources in a wide variety of subjects.More »

FactCheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, monitors accuracy in the US political process by diligently fact-checking everything that prominent political figures say and do. More »

A wealth of online resources compiled by the Library of Congress. More »

Anything you want to know about sports – stats, box scores, game logs, playoffs – you can find it at Sports Reference. This site offers detailed information for fans of baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and the Olympic Games. More »

If you need help with writing, you’ll find it here. Style guides, grammar, mechanics, ESL resources, and much more. More »

Need to know something about chemicals, compounds, substances, or bioassays? You can find it at PubChem, a comprehensive database put together by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. More »

PDR Health is a production of the Physician’s Desk Reference. You can use PDR Health to look up information about prescriptions, herbal medicines, and user-friendly health and wellness information. More »

Whether you need to convert simple measurements or complicated astronomy figures, you’ll be able to do it at OnlineConversion.com, an extensive site featuring hundreds of conversion tools. More »

If you need to translate something, you’ll be able to do it with Lexicool. Over 7000 dictionaries and glossaries here in a wide variety of languages.More »

Find maps and directions at Google Maps; you can also check out locations in Street, Traffic, and Satellite views. Google Maps also periodically offers special features, such as maps for the Winter Olympics.More »

The Genetic Home Reference, a project of the National Library of Medicine, is a stellar resource for genetic information and information about genetic conditions. More »

Get demographic information about nearly any community in the United States at ePodunk, a fascination data collection for over 46,000 different cities, towns, and suburbs in the US.More »

Chronicling America is a project from the Library of Congress; you can “search and view newspaper pages from 1880-1922 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.”More »

Doing research on a company’s human rights impact is difficult – unless you visit the Business and Human Rights Resource Center. This resource covers covers over 4000 companies in over 180 countries, and deals with topics such as discrimination, environment, poverty and development, labor, medical health, security, and trade. More »

BookFinder is a search engine for new, used, rare, out-of-print, and textbooks. Over 150 million books are available here; if you want to find something somewhat obscure, this is the place.More »

View full country profiles from all over the world; in addition to basic stats, the BBC also provides audio and video clips from their archives. More »

Need help on how to pronounce a word – in virtually any language? Try Forvo, the largest pronunciation guide currently online, with hundreds of thousands of words and pronunciations in over 200 different languages. More »

The goal of Rules of Thumb is to find every rule of thumb, aka unwritten codes for how we do something, and gather them in one gigantic database. As of this writing, there are nearly 5000 different rules of thumb in 155 categories ranging from Advertising to Wine. Basically, if you want to get a feel for a subject, or get a ballpark figure for a complicated process or topic, Rules of Thumb is a good place to start. More »

WorldMapper is a collection of hundreds of world maps, each focusing on a particular topic. For example, you can find maps on land area, disease, religion, income, and more. More »

WorldCat allows you to search the largest network of library content and services online, tapping into literally hundreds of different libraries from all over the world. More »

At Our Documents, you can explore 100 cornerstone documents of American history, i.e., the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and many more. More »

The Library of Congress is literally the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections freely available to the public (you might have noticed that the Library of Congress Online Catalog has already been included in this list; the Library of Congress home page is the hub of ALL the content that the Library has to offer). More »

The Voice of the Shuttle, started in 1994, is one of the largest humanities resources on the Web today. Anything from anthropology to religious studies is covered here. More »

This is the original (1919) edition with over 11,000 searchable quotations.More »