Google offers access to academic information

Google has launched a new Google Scholar search service, providing the ability to search for scientific literature located from across the web.
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. It can be used to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities.
For many citations, you'll find a direct link to other articles in the Google Scholar database that cite the article you've selected. So Google Scholar is a citation database too.
The specialized new interface will not be linked from Google's main search page.