Ask HN: how to access scientific papers?

7 points·Tichy··9 comments

What is the usual way to get to read scientific papers? Somehow I haven't really tried it online before. I find that I hit on a lot of summary sites, but few that give access to the PDFs.

Is the only hope to access through a library? Or does becoming a member of ACM help (for computer science)?

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Academic libraries work, although you need to actually go or be affiliated in a way that gives you their online access. The paywalls (ACM, IEEE) are what they are.

Sometimes, not always, if you find a paper behind a paywall but look at the personal or academic home page of the authors you will find pre-print PDFs of the article you are after.

Where I live you can access JSTOR for free, logging in through the public library's website. This only covers a lot a of liberal arts material as well as journals for some of the "softer" sciences (and it's licensed for personal, educational use only). Maybe not quite what you're looking for, but a great resource nonetheless.

I have a friend who is a student, anything I want to read I can usually get like that.

Publicly funded research should be available without charge to the public.

Google Scholar might be what you're looking for.

http://scholar.google.com/

Found that, but they don't seem to have a checkbox for "only papers that can be downloaded" :-/

If your school has a ssh account for you that you can access from the outside you can forward the web traffic via ssh. If all the sites are looking for is the IP block of a school that is paying for the subscriptions then you should be good to go.

ACM's site has tons and tons of papers, highly recommend joining - it's cheap too

You can get a lot of things on CiteSeer

arXiv.org might be the place to search, depending on the subject area. Only been around since 1991 though.

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