I find it easier to access GOogle Scholar via DDG with !scholar than I do with Google Search.

Am I missing something with that flag? when I do that it just redirects to the google scholar results. I'm therefore nto sure the gain of going to duckduckgo.com and having to type !scholar before every query instead of just scholar.google.com

I use !gsch for that.

!gsc is even shorter!

There's also Microsoft Academic search: https://academic.microsoft.com/home (!msacademic)