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A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Academic Databases for Research

In the digital age, academic databases have become essential tools for researchers and students alike. With vast collections of scholarly articles, books, and other resources, these databases provide a wealth of information on various subjects. However, navigating these databases can be overwhelming for those unfamiliar with their functionalities. In this step-by-step guide, we will walk you through the process of using academic databases effectively for your research needs.

Understanding Academic Databases

Before delving into the practical aspects of using academic databases, it’s crucial to understand what they are and how they differ from other sources of information. Academic databases are online platforms that host scholarly content such as journal articles, conference papers, dissertations, and more. Unlike search engines like Google or Wikipedia, which prioritize popular or general content, academic databases focus on peer-reviewed research conducted by experts in their respective fields.

These databases usually require a subscription or access through an institutional affiliation like a university or library. By restricting access to authenticated users only, they ensure the quality and reliability of the content available. Some well-known academic databases include JSTOR, ScienceDirect, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library.

Selecting the Right Database

With numerous academic databases available today, it’s essential to choose the most appropriate one for your research topic. Each database specializes in certain disciplines or subject areas; therefore, selecting a database that aligns with your research interest is paramount.

Start by identifying keywords related to your research topic. These keywords will help you narrow down your search when exploring different databases’ offerings. For example, if you’re researching climate change impacts on biodiversity conservation strategies in marine ecosystems, relevant keywords could include “climate change,” “biodiversity conservation,” “marine ecosystems,” and so on.

Once you have identified your keywords and subject area(s), consult with librarians or experienced researchers who can guide you in selecting the most relevant databases. They can suggest databases that specialize in your field or those that cover a broader range of disciplines.

Conducting Effective Searches

After selecting the appropriate academic database(s), it’s time to conduct effective searches to find the information you need. Most databases offer advanced search options, allowing users to refine their queries and obtain more accurate results.

Start by entering your keywords into the search bar. To enhance your search results, consider using Boolean operators such as “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT” to combine or exclude specific terms. For example, using “climate change AND biodiversity conservation” will retrieve articles that contain both terms, while “climate change NOT marine ecosystems” will exclude articles related to marine ecosystems from your results.

Additionally, take advantage of filters and limiters provided by the database. These options allow you to narrow down your search based on publication date, author, journal name, and other criteria. Utilizing these features will help you focus on the most recent and relevant research within your field.

Evaluating and Accessing Sources

Once you have obtained a list of potentially relevant sources from your search, it’s essential to evaluate their quality before incorporating them into your research. Academic databases often provide information about each source’s credibility by displaying metrics such as citation counts, impact factors, and peer review status.

Consider factors such as the author’s expertise and affiliations, publication date (preferably recent), journal reputation (if applicable), and relevance to your research question when assessing sources. Additionally, check for any potential biases or conflicts of interest that may affect the objectivity of the research findings.

After evaluating sources for their suitability and reliability, access them through the database’s provided links or follow instructions for accessing full-text versions if available. Some articles may be openly accessible while others may require additional permissions or subscriptions.

In conclusion, academic databases are invaluable resources for researchers seeking reliable and up-to-date information. By understanding the basics of academic databases, selecting the right database(s) for your research, conducting effective searches, and evaluating and accessing sources, you can maximize the benefits these platforms offer. So, dive into the world of academic databases and unlock a treasure trove of knowledge for your research endeavors.

This text was generated using a large language model, and select text has been reviewed and moderated for purposes such as readability.

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21 Legit Research Databases for Free Journal Articles in 2022

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Written by  Scribendi

Has this ever happened to you? While looking for websites for research, you come across a research paper site that claims to connect academics to a peer-reviewed article database for free.

Intrigued, you search for keywords related to your topic, only to discover that you must pay a hefty subscription fee to access the service. After the umpteenth time being duped, you begin to wonder if there's even such a thing as free journal articles .

Subscription fees and paywalls are often the bane of students and academics, especially those at small institutions who don't provide access to many free article directories and repositories.

Whether you're working on an undergraduate paper, a PhD dissertation, or a medical research study, we want to help you find tools to locate and access the information you need to produce well-researched, compelling, and innovative work.

Below, we discuss why peer-reviewed articles are superior and list out the best free article databases to use in 2022.

Download Our Free Research Database Roundup PDF

Why peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are more authoritative.

Determining what sources are reliable can be challenging. Peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are the gold standard in academic research. Reputable academic journals have a rigorous peer-review process.

The peer review process provides accountability to the academic community, as well as to the content of the article. The peer review process involves qualified experts in a specific (often very specific) field performing a review of an article's methods and findings to determine things like quality and credibility.

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in peer-reviewed article databases and research databases, and if you know that a database of journals is reliable, that can offer reassurances about the reliability of a free article. Peer review is often double blind, meaning that the author removes all identifying information and, likewise, does not know the identity of the reviewers. This helps reviewers maintain objectivity and impartiality so as to judge an article based on its merit.

Where to Find Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in a variety of research databases. Below is a list of some of the major databases you can use to find peer-reviewed articles and other sources in disciplines spanning the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

What Are Open Access Journals?

An open access (OA) journal is a journal whose content can be accessed without payment. This provides scholars, students, and researchers with free journal articles . OA journals use alternate methods of funding to cover publication costs so that articles can be published without having to pass those publication costs on to the reader.

Some of these funding models include standard funding methods like advertising, public funding, and author payment models, where the author pays a fee in order to publish in the journal. There are OA journals that have non-peer-reviewed academic content, as well as journals that focus on dissertations, theses, and papers from conferences, but the main focus of OA is peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.

The internet has certainly made it easier to access research articles and other scholarly publications without needing access to a university library, and OA takes another step in that direction by removing financial barriers to academic content.

Choosing Wisely

Features of legitimate oa journals.

 There are things to look out for when trying to decide if a free publication journal is legitimate:

Mission statement —The mission statement for an OA journal should be available on their website.

Publication history —Is the journal well established? How long has it been available?

Editorial board —Who are the members of the editorial board, and what are their credentials?

Indexing —Can the journal be found in a reliable database?

Peer review —What is the peer review process? Does the journal allow enough time in the process for a reliable assessment of quality?

Impact factor —What is the average number of times the journal is cited over a two-year period?

Features of Illegitimate OA Journals

There are predatory publications that take advantage of the OA format, and they are something to be wary of. Here are some things to look out for:

Contact information —Is contact information provided? Can it be verified?

Turnaround —If the journal makes dubious claims about the amount of time from submission to publication, it is likely unreliable.

Editorial board —Much like determining legitimacy, looking at the editorial board and their credentials can help determine illegitimacy.

Indexing —Can the journal be found in any scholarly databases?

Peer review —Is there a statement about the peer review process? Does it fit what you know about peer review?

How to Find Scholarly Articles

Identify keywords.

Keywords are included in an article by the author. Keywords are an excellent way to find content relevant to your research topic or area of interest. In academic searches, much like you would on a search engine, you can use keywords to navigate through what is available to find exactly what you're looking for.

Authors provide keywords that will help you easily find their article when researching a related topic, often including general terms to accommodate broader searches, as well as some more specific terms for those with a narrower scope. Keywords can be used individually or in combination to refine your scholarly article search.

Narrow Down Results

Sometimes, search results can be overwhelming, and searching for free articles on a journal database is no exception, but there are multiple ways to narrow down your results. A good place to start is discipline.

What category does your topic fall into (psychology, architecture, machine learning, etc.)? You can also narrow down your search with a year range if you're looking for articles that are more recent.

A Boolean search can be incredibly helpful. This entails including terms like AND between two keywords in your search if you need both keywords to be in your results (or, if you are looking to exclude certain keywords, to exclude these words from the results).

Consider Different Avenues

If you're not having luck using keywords in your search for free articles, you may still be able to find what you're looking for by changing your tactics. Casting a wider net sometimes yields positive results, so it may be helpful to try searching by subject if keywords aren't getting you anywhere.

You can search for a specific publisher to see if they have OA publications in the academic journal database. And, if you know more precisely what you're looking for, you can search for the title of the article or the author's name.

The Top 21 Free Online Journal and Research Databases

Navigating OA journals, research article databases, and academic websites trying to find high-quality sources for your research can really make your head spin. What constitutes a reliable database? What is a useful resource for your discipline and research topic? How can you find and access full-text, peer-reviewed articles?

Fortunately, we're here to help. Having covered some of the ins and outs of peer review, OA journals, and how to search for articles, we have compiled a list of the top 21 free online journals and the best research databases. This list of databases is a great resource to help you navigate the wide world of academic research.

These databases provide a variety of free sources, from abstracts and citations to full-text, peer-reviewed OA journals. With databases covering specific areas of research and interdisciplinary databases that provide a variety of material, these are some of our favorite free databases, and they're totally legit!

CORE is a multidisciplinary aggregator of OA research. CORE has the largest collection of OA articles available. It allows users to search more than 219 million OA articles. While most of these link to the full-text article on the original publisher's site, or to a PDF available for download, five million records are hosted directly on CORE.

CORE's mission statement is a simple and straightforward commitment to offering OA articles to anyone, anywhere in the world. They also host communities that are available for researchers to join and an ambassador community to enhance their services globally. In addition to a straightforward keyword search, CORE offers advanced search options to filter results by publication type, year, language, journal, repository, and author.

CORE's user interface is easy to use and navigate. Search results can be sorted based on relevance or recency, and you can search for relevant content directly from the results screen.

Collection: 219,537,133 OA articles

Other Services: Additional services are available from CORE, with extras that are geared toward researchers, repositories, and businesses. There are tools for accessing raw data, including an API that provides direct access to data, datasets that are available for download, and FastSync for syncing data content from the CORE database.

CORE has a recommender plug-in that suggests relevant OA content in the database while conducting a search and a discovery feature that helps you discover OA versions of paywalled articles. Other features include tools for managing content, such as a dashboard for managing repository output and the Repository Edition service to enhance discoverability.

Good Source of Peer-Reviewed Articles: Yes

Advanced Search Options: Language, author, journal, publisher, repository, DOI, year

2. ScienceOpen

Functioning as a research and publishing network, ScienceOpen offers OA to more than 74 million articles in all areas of science. Although you do need to register to view the full text of articles, registration is free. The advanced search function is highly detailed, allowing you to find exactly the research you're looking for.

The Berlin- and Boston-based company was founded in 2013 to "facilitate open and public communications between academics and to allow ideas to be judged on their merit, regardless of where they come from." Search results can be exported for easy integration with reference management systems.

You can also bookmark articles for later research. There are extensive networking options, including your Science Open profile, a forum for interacting with other researchers, the ability to track your usage and citations, and an interactive bibliography. Users have the ability to review articles and provide their knowledge and insight within the community.

Collection: 74,560,631

Other Services: None

Advanced Search Options:  Content type, source, author, journal, discipline

3. Directory of Open Access Journals

A multidisciplinary, community-curated directory, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) gives researchers access to high-quality peer-reviewed journals. It has archived more than two million articles from 17,193 journals, allowing you to either browse by subject or search by keyword.

The site was launched in 2003 with the aim of increasing the visibility of OA scholarly journals online. Content on the site covers subjects from science, to law, to fine arts, and everything in between. DOAJ has a commitment to "increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, OA scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language."

Information about the journal is available with each search result. Abstracts are also available in a collapsible format directly from the search screen. The scholarly article website is somewhat simple, but it is easy to navigate. There are 16 principles of transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing that clearly outline DOAJ policies and standards.

Collection: 6,817,242

Advanced Search Options:  Subject, journal, year

4. Education Resources Information Center

The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) of the Institution of Education Sciences allows you to search by topic for material related to the field of education. Links lead to other sites, where you may have to purchase the information, but you can search for full-text articles only. You can also search only peer-reviewed sources.

The service primarily indexes journals, gray literature (such as technical reports, white papers, and government documents), and books. All sources of material on ERIC go through a formal review process prior to being indexed. ERIC's selection policy is available as a PDF on their website.

The ERIC website has an extensive FAQ section to address user questions. This includes categories like general questions, peer review, and ERIC content. There are also tips for advanced searches, as well as general guidance on the best way to search the database. ERIC is an excellent database for content specific to education.

Collection: 1,292,897

Advanced Search Options: Boolean

5. arXiv e-Print Archive

The arXiv e-Print Archive is run by Cornell University Library and curated by volunteer moderators, and it now offers OA to more than one million e-prints.

There are advisory committees for all eight subjects available on the database. With a stated commitment to an "emphasis on openness, collaboration, and scholarship," the arXiv e-Print Archive is an excellent STEM resource.

The interface is not as user-friendly as some of the other databases available, and the website hosts a blog to provide news and updates, but it is otherwise a straightforward math and science resource. There are simple and advanced search options, and, in addition to conducting searches for specific topics and articles, users can browse content by subject. The arXiv e-Print Archive clearly states that they do not peer review the e-prints in the database.

Collection: 1,983,891

Good Source of Peer-Reviewed Articles: No

Advanced Search Options:  Subject, date, title, author, abstract, DOI

6. Social Science Research Network

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a collection of papers from the social sciences community. It is a highly interdisciplinary platform used to search for scholarly articles related to 67 social science topics. SSRN has a variety of research networks for the various topics available through the free scholarly database.

The site offers more than 700,000 abstracts and more than 600,000 full-text papers. There is not yet a specific option to search for only full-text articles, but, because most of the papers on the site are free access, it's not often that you encounter a paywall. There is currently no option to search for only peer-reviewed articles.

You must become a member to use the services, but registration is free and enables you to interact with other scholars around the world. SSRN is "passionately committed to increasing inclusion, diversity and equity in scholarly research," and they encourage and discuss the use of inclusive language in scholarship whenever possible.

Collection: 1,058,739 abstracts; 915,452 articles

Advanced Search Options: Term, author, date, network

7. Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a big player in the world of OA science. Publishing 12 OA journals, the nonprofit organization is committed to facilitating openness in academic research. According to the site, "all PLOS content is at the highest possible level of OA, meaning that scientific articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere."

PLOS outlines four fundamental goals that guide the organization: break boundaries, empower researchers, redefine quality, and open science. All PLOS journals are peer-reviewed, and all 12 journals uphold rigorous ethical standards for research, publication, and scientific reporting.

PLOS does not offer advanced search options. Content is organized by topic into research communities that users can browse through, in addition to options to search for both articles and journals. The PLOS website also has resources for peer reviewers, including guidance on becoming a reviewer and on how to best participate in the peer review process.

Collection: 12 journals

Advanced Search Options: None

8. OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR, or the Directory of Open Access Repositories, is a comprehensive resource for finding free OA journals and articles. Using Google Custom Search, OpenDOAR combs through OA repositories around the world and returns relevant research in all disciplines.

The repositories it searches through are assessed and categorized by OpenDOAR staff to ensure they meet quality standards. Inclusion criteria for the database include requirements for OA content, global access, and categorically appropriate content, in addition to various other quality assurance measures. OpenDOAR has metadata, data, content, preservation, and submission policies for repositories, in addition to two OA policy statements regarding minimum and optimum recommendations.

This database allows users to browse and search repositories, which can then be selected, and articles and data can be accessed from the repository directly. As a repository database, much of the content on the site is geared toward the support of repositories and OA standards.

Collection: 5,768 repositories

Other Services: OpenDOAR offers a variety of additional services. Given the nature of the platform, services are primarily aimed at repositories and institutions, and there is a marked focus on OA in general. Sherpa services are OA archiving tools for authors and institutions.

They also offer various resources for OA support and compliance regarding standards and policies. The publication router matches publications and publishers with appropriate repositories.

There are also services and resources from JISC for repositories for cost management, discoverability, research impact, and interoperability, including ORCID consortium membership information. Additionally, a repository self-assessment tool is available for members.

Advanced Search Options:  Name, organization name, repository type, software name, content type, subject, country, region

9. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is operated by the Bielefeld University Library in Germany, and it offers more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 sources. Sixty percent of its content is OA, and you can filter your search accordingly.

BASE has rigorous inclusion requirements for content providers regarding quality and relevance, and they maintain a list of content providers for the sake of transparency, which can be easily found on their website. BASE has a fairly elegant interface. Search results can be organized by author, title, or date.

From the search results, items can be selected and exported, added to favorites, emailed, and searched in Google Scholar. There are basic and advanced search features, with the advanced search offering numerous options for refining search criteria. There is also a feature on the website that saves recent searches without additional steps from the user.

Collection: 276,019,066 documents; 9,286 content providers

Advanced Search Options:  Author, subject, year, content provider, language, document type, access, terms of reuse

10. Digital Library of the Commons Repository

Run by Indiana University, the Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) Repository is a multidisciplinary journal repository that allows users to access thousands of free and OA articles from around the world. You can browse by document type, date, author, title, and more or search for keywords relevant to your topic.

DCL also offers the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons, an image database, and a keyword thesaurus for enhanced search parameters. The repository includes books, book chapters, conference papers, journal articles, surveys, theses and dissertations, and working papers. DCL advanced search features drop-down menus of search types with built-in Boolean search options.

Searches can be sorted by relevance, title, date, or submission date in ascending or descending order. Abstracts are included in selected search results, with access to full texts available, and citations can be exported from the same page. Additionally, the image database search includes tips for better search results.

Collection: 10,784

Advanced Search Options:  Author, date, title, subject, sector, region, conference

11. CIA World Factbook

The CIA World Factbook is a little different from the other resources on this list in that it is not an online journal directory or repository. It is, however, a useful free online research database for academics in a variety of disciplines.

All the information is free to access, and it provides facts about every country in the world, which are organized by category and include information about history, geography, transportation, and much more. The World Factbook can be searched by country or region, and there is also information about the world’s oceans.

This site contains resources related to the CIA as an organization rather than being a scientific journal database specifically. The site has a user interface that is easy to navigate. The site also provides a section for updates regarding changes to what information is available and how it is organized, making it easier to interact with the information you are searching for.

Collection: 266 countries

12. Paperity

Paperity boasts its status as the "first multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals and papers." Their focus is on helping you avoid paywalls while connecting you to authoritative research. In addition to providing readers with easy access to thousands of journals, Paperity seeks to help authors reach their audiences and help journals increase their exposure to boost readership.

Paperity has journal articles for every discipline, and the database offers more than a dozen advanced search options, including the length of the paper and the number of authors. There is even an option to include, exclude, or exclusively search gray papers.

Paperity is available for mobile, with both a mobile site and the Paperity Reader, an app that is available for both Android and Apple users. The database is also available on social media. You can interact with Paperity via Twitter and Facebook, and links to their social media are available on their homepage, including their Twitter feed.

Collection: 8,837,396

Advanced Search Options: Title, abstract, journal title, journal ISSN, publisher, year of publication, number of characters, number of authors, DOI, author, affiliation, language, country, region, continent, gray papers

13. dblp Computer Science Bibliography

The dblp Computer Science Bibliography is an online index of major computer science publications. dblp was founded in 1993, though until 2010 it was a university-specific database at the University of Trier in Germany. It is currently maintained by the Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics.

Although it provides access to both OA articles and those behind a paywall, you can limit your search to only OA articles. The site indexes more than three million publications, making it an invaluable resource in the world of computer science. dblp entries are color-coded based on the type of item.

dblp has an extensive FAQ section, so questions that might arise about topics like the database itself, navigating the website, or the data on dblp, in addition to several other topics, are likely to be answered. The website also hosts a blog and has a section devoted to website statistics.

Collection: 5,884,702

14. EconBiz

EconBiz is a great resource for economic and business studies. A service of the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, it offers access to full texts online, with the option of searching for OA material only. Their literature search is performed across multiple international databases.

EconBiz has an incredibly useful research skills section, with resources such as Guided Walk, a service to help students and researchers navigate searches, evaluate sources, and correctly cite references; the Research Guide EconDesk, a help desk to answer specific questions and provide advice to aid in literature searches; and the Academic Career Kit for what they refer to as Early Career Researchers.

Other helpful resources include personal literature lists, a calendar of events for relevant calls for papers, conferences, and workshops, and an economics terminology thesaurus to help in finding keywords for searches. To stay up-to-date with EconBiz, you can sign up for their newsletter.

Collection: 1,075,219

Advanced Search Options:  Title, subject, author, institution, ISBN/ISSN, journal, publisher, language, OA only

15. BioMed Central

BioMed Central provides OA research from more than 300 peer-reviewed journals. While originally focused on resources related to the physical sciences, math, and engineering, BioMed Central has branched out to include journals that cover a broader range of disciplines, with the aim of providing a single platform that provides OA articles for a variety of research needs. You can browse these journals by subject or title, or you can search all articles for your required keyword.

BioMed Central has a commitment to peer-reviewed sources and to the peer review process itself, continually seeking to help and improve the peer review process. They're "committed to maintaining high standards through full and stringent peer review." They publish the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review , which publishes research on the subject.

Additionally, the website includes resources to assist and support editors as part of their commitment to providing high-quality, peer-reviewed OA articles.

Collection: 507,212

Other Services: BMC administers the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) registry. While initially designed for registering clinical trials, since its creation in 2000, the registry has broadened its scope to include other health studies as well.

The registry is recognized by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO), and it meets the requirements established by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

The study records included in the registry are all searchable and free to access. The ISRCTN registry "supports transparency in clinical research, helps reduce selective reporting of results and ensures an unbiased and complete evidence base."

Advanced Search Options:  Author, title, journal, list

A multidisciplinary search engine, JURN provides links to various scholarly websites, articles, and journals that are free to access or OA. Covering the fields of the arts, humanities, business, law, nature, science, and medicine, JURN has indexed almost 5,000 repositories to help you find exactly what you're looking for.

Search features are enhanced by Google, but searches are filtered through their index of repositories. JURN seeks to reach a wide audience, with their search engine tailored to researchers from "university lecturers and students seeking a strong search tool for OA content" and "advanced and ambitious students, age 14-18" to "amateur historians and biographers" and "unemployed and retired lecturers."

That being said, JURN is very upfront about its limitations. They admit to not being a good resource for educational studies, social studies, or psychology, and conference archives are generally not included due to frequently unstable URLs.

Collection: 5,064 indexed journals

Other Services: JURN has a browser add-on called UserScript. This add-on allows users to integrate the JURN database directly into Google Search. When performing a search through Google, the add-on creates a link that sends the search directly to JURN CSE. JURN CSE is a search service that is hosted by Google.

Clicking the link from the Google Search bar will run your search through the JURN database from the Google homepage. There is also an interface for a DuckDuckGo search box; while this search engine has an emphasis on user privacy, for smaller sites that may be indexed by JURN, DuckDuckGo may not provide the same depth of results.

Advanced Search Options:  Google search modifiers

Dryad is a digital repository of curated, OA scientific research data. Launched in 2009, it is run by a not-for-profit membership organization, with a community of institutional and publisher members for whom their services have been designed. Members include institutions such as Stanford, UCLA, and Yale, as well as publishers like Oxford University Press and Wiley.

Dryad aims to "promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely reused to create knowledge." It is free to access for the search and discovery of data. Their user experience is geared toward easy self-depositing, supports Creative Commons licensing, and provides DOIs for all their content.

Note that there is a publishing charge associated if you wish to publish your data in Dryad. When searching datasets, they are accompanied by author information and abstracts for the associated studies, and citation information is provided for easy attribution.

Collection: 44,458

Advanced Search Options: No

Run by the British Library, the E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) allows you to search over 500,000 doctoral theses in a variety of disciplines. All of the doctoral theses available on EThOS have been awarded by higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.

Although some full texts are behind paywalls, you can limit your search to items available for immediate download, either directly through EThOS or through an institution's website. More than half of the records in the database provide access to full-text theses.

EThOS notes that they do not hold all records for all institutions, but they strive to index as many doctoral theses as possible, and the database is constantly expanding, with approximately 3,000 new records added and 2,000 new full-text theses available every month. The availability of full-text theses is dependent on multiple factors, including their availability in the institutional repository and the level of repository development.

Collection: 500,000+

Advanced Search Options:  Abstract, author's first name, author's last name, awarding body, current institution, EThOS ID, year, language, qualifications, research supervisor, sponsor/funder, keyword, title

PubMed is a research platform well-known in the fields of science and medicine. It was created and developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It has been available since 1996 and offers access to "more than 33 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books."

While PubMed does not provide full-text articles directly, and many full-text articles may be behind paywalls or require subscriptions to access them, when articles are available from free sources, such as through PubMed Central (PMC), those links are provided with the citations and abstracts that PubMed does provide.

PMC, which was established in 2000 by the NLM, is a free full-text archive that includes more than 6,000,000 records. PubMed records link directly to corresponding PMC results. PMC content is provided by publishers and other content owners, digitization projects, and authors directly.

Collection: 33,000,000+

Advanced Search Options: Author's first name, author's last name, identifier, corporation, date completed, date created, date entered, date modified, date published, MeSH, book, conflict of interest statement, EC/RN number, editor, filter, grant number, page number, pharmacological action, volume, publication type, publisher, secondary source ID, text, title, abstract, transliterated title

20. Semantic Scholar

A unique and easy-to-use resource, Semantic Scholar defines itself not just as a research database but also as a "search and discovery tool." Semantic Scholar harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to efficiently sort through millions of science-related papers based on your search terms.

Through this singular application of machine learning, Semantic Scholar expands search results to include topic overviews based on your search terms, with the option to create an alert for or further explore the topic. It also provides links to related topics.

In addition, search results produce "TLDR" summaries in order to provide concise overviews of articles and enhance your research by helping you to navigate quickly and easily through the available literature to find the most relevant information. According to the site, although some articles are behind paywalls, "the data [they] have for those articles is limited," so you can expect to receive mostly full-text results.

Collection: 203,379,033

Other Services: Semantic Scholar supports multiple popular browsers. Content can be accessed through both mobile and desktop versions of Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.

Additionally, Semantic Scholar provides browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox, so AI-powered scholarly search results are never more than a click away. The mobile interface includes an option for Semantic Swipe, a new way of interacting with your research results.

There are also beta features that can be accessed as part of the Beta Program, which will provide you with features that are being actively developed and require user feedback for further improvement.

Advanced Search Options: Field of study, date range, publication type, author, journal, conference, PDF

Zenodo, powered by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was launched in 2013. Taking its name from Zenodotus, the first librarian of the ancient library of Alexandria, Zenodo is a tool "built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in open science." Zenodo accepts all research from every discipline in any file format.

However, Zenodo also curates uploads and promotes peer-reviewed material that is available through OA. A DOI is assigned to everything that is uploaded to Zenodo, making research easily findable and citable. You can sort by keyword, title, journal, and more and download OA documents directly from the site.

While there are closed access and restricted access items in the database, the vast majority of research is OA material. Search results can be filtered by access type, making it easy to view the free articles available in the database.

Collection: 2,220,000+

Advanced Search Options:  Access, file type, keywords

Check out our roundup of free research databases as a handy one-page PDF.

How to find peer-reviewed articles.

There are a lot of free scholarly articles available from various sources. The internet is a big place. So how do you go about finding peer-reviewed articles when conducting your research? It's important to make sure you are using reputable sources.

The first source of the article is the person or people who wrote it. Checking out the author can give you some initial insight into how much you can trust what you’re reading. Looking into the publication information of your sources can also indicate whether the article is reliable.

Aspects of the article, such as subject and audience, tone, and format, are other things you can look at when evaluating whether the article you're using is valid, reputable, peer-reviewed material. So, let's break that down into various components so you can assess your research to ensure that you're using quality articles and conducting solid research.

Check the Author

Peer-reviewed articles are written by experts or scholars with experience in the field or discipline they're writing about. The research in a peer-reviewed article has to pass a rigorous evaluation process, so it’s a foregone conclusion that the author(s) of a peer-reviewed article should have experience or training related to that research.

When evaluating an article, take a look at the author’s information. What credentials does the author have to indicate that their research has scholarly weight behind it? Finding out what type of degree the author has—and what that degree is in—can provide insight into what kind of authority the author is on the subject.

Something else that might lend credence to the author’s scholarly role is their professional affiliation. A look at what organization or institution they are affiliated with can tell you a lot about their experience or expertise. Where were they trained, and who is verifying their research?

Identify Subject and Audience

The ultimate goal of a study is to answer a question. Scholarly articles are also written for scholarly audiences, especially articles that have gone through the peer review process. This means that the author is trying to reach experts, researchers, academics, and students in the field or topic the research is based on.

Think about the question the author is trying to answer by conducting this research, why, and for whom. What is the subject of the article? What question has it set out to answer? What is the purpose of finding the information? Is the purpose of the article of importance to other scholars? Is it original content?

Research should also be approached analytically. Is the methodology sound? Is the author using an analytical approach to evaluate the data that they have obtained? Are the conclusions they've reached substantiated by their data and analysis? Answering these questions can reveal a lot about the article’s validity.

Format Matters

Reliable articles from peer-reviewed sources have certain format elements to be aware of. The first is an abstract. An abstract is a short summary or overview of the article. Does the article have an abstract? It's unlikely that you're reading a peer-reviewed article if it doesn’t. Peer-reviewed journals will also have a word count range. If an article seems far too short or incredibly long, that may be reason to doubt it.

Another feature of reliable articles is the sections the information is divided into. Peer-reviewed research articles will have clear, concise sections that appropriately organize the information. This might include a literature review, methodology, and results in the case of research articles and a conclusion.

One of the most important sections is the references or bibliography. This is where the researcher lists all the sources of their information. A peer-reviewed source will have a comprehensive reference section.

An article that has been written to reach an academic community will have an academic tone. The language that is used, and the way this language is used, is important to consider. If the article is riddled with grammatical errors, confusing syntax, and casual language, it almost definitely didn't make it through the peer review process.

Also consider the use of terminology. Every discipline is going to have standard terminology or jargon that can be used and understood by other academics in the discipline. The language in a peer-reviewed article is going to reflect that.

If the author is going out of their way to explain simple terms, or terms that are standard to the field or discipline, it's unlikely that the article has been peer reviewed, as this is something that the author would be asked to address during the review process.

Publication

The source of the article will be a very good indicator of the likelihood that it was peer reviewed. Where was the article published? Was it published alongside other academic articles in the same discipline? Is it a legitimate and reputable scholarly publication?

A trade publication or newspaper might be legitimate or reputable, but it is not a scholarly source, and it will not have been subject to the peer review process. Scholarly journals are the best resource for peer-reviewed articles, but it's important to remember that not all scholarly journals are peer reviewed.

It’s helpful to look at a scholarly source’s website, as peer-reviewed journals will have a clear indication of the peer review process. University libraries, institutional repositories, and reliable databases (and you now might have a list of some legit ones) can also help provide insight into whether an article comes from a peer-reviewed journal.

Common Research Mistakes to Avoid

Research is a lot of work. Even with high standards and good intentions, it’s easy to make mistakes. Perhaps you searched for access to scientific journals for free and found the perfect peer-reviewed sources, but you forgot to document everything, and your references are a mess. Or, you only searched for free online articles and missed out on a ground-breaking study that was behind a paywall.

Whether your research is for a degree or to get published or to satisfy your own inquisitive nature, or all of the above, you want all that work to produce quality results. You want your research to be thorough and accurate.

To have any hope of contributing to the literature on your research topic, your results need to be high quality. You might not be able to avoid every potential mistake, but here are some that are both common and easy to avoid.

Sticking to One Source

One of the hallmarks of good research is a healthy reference section. Using a variety of sources gives you a better answer to your question. Even if all of the literature is in agreement, looking at various aspects of the topic may provide you with an entirely different picture than you would have if you looked at your research question from only one angle.

Not Documenting Every Fact

As you conduct your research, do yourself a favor and write everything down. Everything you include in your paper or article that you got from another source is going to need to be added to your references and cited.

It's important, especially if your aim is to conduct ethical, high-quality research, that all of your research has proper attribution. If you don't document as you go, you could end up making a lot of work for yourself if the information you don’t write down is something that later, as you write your paper, you really need.

Using Outdated Materials

Academia is an ever-changing landscape. What was true in your academic discipline or area of research ten years ago may have since been disproven. If fifteen studies have come out since the article that you're using was published, it's more than a little likely that you're going to be basing your research on flawed or dated information.

If the information you're basing your research on isn’t as up-to-date as possible, your research won't be of quality or able to stand up to any amount of scrutiny. You don’t want all of your hard work to be for naught.

Relying Solely on Open Access Journals

OA is a great resource for conducting academic research. There are high-quality journal articles available through OA, and that can be very helpful for your research. But, just because you have access to free articles, that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be found behind a paywall.

Just as dismissing high-quality peer-reviewed articles because they are OA would be limiting, not exploring any paid content at all is equally short-sighted. If you're seeking to conduct thorough and comprehensive research, exploring all of your options for quality sources is going to be to your benefit.

Digging Too Deep or Not Deep Enough

Research is an art form, and it involves a delicate balance of information. If you conduct your research using only broad search terms, you won't be able to answer your research question well, or you'll find that your research provides information that is closely related to your topic but, ultimately, your findings are vague and unsubstantiated.

On the other hand, if you delve deeply into your research topic with specific searches and turn up too many sources, you might have a lot of information that is adjacent to your topic but without focus and perhaps not entirely relevant. It's important to answer your research question concisely but thoroughly.

Different Types of Scholarly Articles

Different types of scholarly articles have different purposes. An original research article, also called an empirical article, is the product of a study or an experiment. This type of article seeks to answer a question or fill a gap in the existing literature.

Research articles will have a methodology, results, and a discussion of the findings of the experiment or research and typically a conclusion.

Review articles overview the current literature and research and provide a summary of what the existing research indicates or has concluded. This type of study will have a section for the literature review, as well as a discussion of the findings of that review. Review articles will have a particularly extensive reference or bibliography section.

Theoretical articles draw on existing literature to create new theories or conclusions, or look at current theories from a different perspective, to contribute to the foundational knowledge of the field of study.

10 Tips for Navigating Journal Databases

Use the right academic journal database for your search, be that interdisciplinary or specific to your field. Or both!

If it’s an option, set the search results to return only peer-reviewed sources.

Start by using search terms that are relevant to your topic without being overly specific.

Try synonyms, especially if your keywords aren’t returning the desired results.

Even if you’ve found some good articles, try searching using different terms.

Explore the advanced search features of the database(s).

Learn to use Booleans (AND, OR, NOT) to expand or narrow your results.

Once you’ve gotten some good results from a more general search, try narrowing your search.

Read through abstracts when trying to find articles relevant to your research.

Keep track of your research and use citation tools. It’ll make life easier when it comes time to compile your references.

7 Frequently Asked Questions

1. how do i get articles for free.

Free articles can be found through free online academic journals, OA databases, or other databases that include OA journals and articles. These resources allow you to access free papers online so you can conduct your research without getting stuck behind a paywall.

Academics don’t receive payment for the articles they contribute to journals. There are often, in fact, publication fees that scholars pay in order to publish. This is one of the funding structures that allows OA journals to provide free content so that you don’t have to pay fees or subscription costs to access journal articles.

2. How Do I Find Journal Articles?

Journal articles can be found in databases and institutional repositories that can be accessed at university libraries. However, online research databases that contain OA articles are the best resource for getting free access to journal articles that are available online.

Peer-reviewed journal articles are the best to use for academic research, and there are a number of databases where you can find peer-reviewed OA journal articles. Once you've found a useful article, you can look through the references for the articles the author used to conduct their research, and you can then search online databases for those articles, too.

3. How Do I Find Peer-Reviewed Articles?

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in reputable scholarly peer-reviewed journals. High-quality journals and journal articles can be found online using academic search engines and free research databases. These resources are excellent for finding OA articles, including peer-reviewed articles.

OA articles are articles that can be accessed for free. While some scholarly search engines and databases include articles that aren't peer reviewed, there are also some that provide only peer-reviewed articles, and databases that include non-peer-reviewed articles often have advanced search features that enable you to select “peer review only.” The database will return results that are exclusively peer-reviewed content.

4. What Are Research Databases?

A research database is a list of journals, articles, datasets, and/or abstracts that allows you to easily search for scholarly and academic resources and conduct research online. There are databases that are interdisciplinary and cover a variety of topics.

For example, Paperity might be a great resource for a chemist as well as a linguist, and there are databases that are more specific to a certain field. So, while ERIC might be one of the best educational databases available for OA content, it's not going to be one of the best databases for finding research in the field of microbiology.

5. How Do I Find Scholarly Articles for Specific Fields?

There are interdisciplinary research databases that provide articles in a variety of fields, as well as research databases that provide articles that cater to specific disciplines. Additionally, a journal repository or index can be a helpful resource for finding articles in a specific field.

When searching an interdisciplinary database, there are frequently advanced search features that allow you to narrow the search results down so that they are specific to your field. Selecting “psychology” in the advanced search features will return psychology journal articles in your search results. You can also try databases that are specific to your field.

If you're searching for law journal articles, many law reviews are OA. If you don’t know of any databases specific to history, visiting a journal repository or index and searching “history academic journals” can return a list of journals specific to history and provide you with a place to begin your research.

6. Are Peer-Reviewed Articles Really More Legitimate?

The short answer is yes, peer-reviewed articles are more legitimate resources for academic research. The peer review process provides legitimacy, as it is a rigorous review of the content of an article that is performed by scholars and academics who are experts in their field of study. The review provides an evaluation of the quality and credibility of the article.

Non-peer-reviewed articles are not subject to a review process and do not undergo the same level of scrutiny. This means that non-peer-reviewed articles are unlikely, or at least not as likely, to meet the same standards that peer-reviewed articles do.

7. Are Free Article Directories Legitimate?

Yes! As with anything, some databases are going to be better for certain requirements than others. But, a scholarly article database being free is not a reason in itself to question its legitimacy.

Free scholarly article databases can provide access to abstracts, scholarly article websites, journal repositories, and high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles. The internet has a lot of information, and it's often challenging to figure out what information is reliable. 

Research databases and article directories are great resources to help you conduct your research. Our list of the best research paper websites is sure to provide you with sources that are totally legit.

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14 Websites to Download Research Paper for Free – 2023

Download Research Paper for Free

Table of contents

2. z-library, 3. library genesis, 4. unpaywall, 5. gettheresearch.org, 6. directory of open access journals (doaj), 7. researcher, 8. science open, 10. internet archive scholar, 11. citationsy archives, 13. dimensions, 14. paperpanda.

Collecting and reading relevant research articles to one’s research areas is important for PhD scholars. But for any research scholar, downloading a research paper is one of the most difficult tasks. You must pay for access to high-quality research materials or subscribe to the journal or publication. In this article, ilovephd lists the top 14 websites to download free research papers, journals, books, datasets, patents, and conference proceedings downloads.

Download Research Paper for Free – 2023

14 best free websites to download research papers are listed below:

Sci-Hub is a website link with over 64.5 million academic papers and articles available for direct download. It bypasses publisher paywalls by allowing access through educational institution proxies.  To download papers Sci-Hub  stores papers in its repository, this storage is called Library Genesis (LibGen) or library genesis proxy 2023.

Visit: Working Sci-Hub Proxy Links – 2023

Z-Library is a clone of Library Genesis, a shadow library project that allows users to share scholarly journal articles, academic texts, and general-interest books via file sharing (some of which are pirated). The majority of its books come from Library Genesis, however, some are posted directly to the site by individuals.

Individuals can also donate to the website’s repository to make literature more widely available. Z-library claims to have more than  10,139,382 Books  and  84,837,646 Articles  articles as of April 25, 2023.

It promises to be “the world’s largest e-book library” as well as “the world’s largest scientific papers repository,” according to the project’s page for academic publications (at booksc.org). Z-library also describes itself as a donation-based non-profit organization.

Visit: Z-Library – You can Download 70,000,000+ scientific articles for free

The Library Genesis aggregator is a community aiming at collecting and cataloging item descriptions for the most part of scientific, scientific, and technical directions, as well as file metadata. In addition to the descriptions, the aggregator contains only links to third-party resources hosted by users. All information posted on the website is collected from publicly available public Internet resources and is intended solely for informational purposes.

Visit: libgen.li

Unpaywall harvests Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and makes it easy to find, track, and use. It is integrated into thousands of library systems, search platforms, and other information products worldwide. In fact, if you’re involved in scholarly communication, there’s a good chance you’ve already used Unpaywall data.

Unpaywall is run by OurResearch, a nonprofit dedicated to making scholarships more accessible to everyone. Open is our passion. So it’s only natural our source code is open, too.

Visit: unpaywall.org

GetTheResearch.org is an  Artificial Intelligence(AI)  powered search engine for search and understand  scientific articles  for researchers and scientists. It was developed as a part of the  Unpaywall  project. Unpaywall is a database of 23,329,737 free scholarly Open Access(OA) articles from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use.

Visit: Find and Understand 25 Million Peer-Reviewed Research Papers for Free

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 with 300 open-access journals. Today, this independent index contains almost 17 500 peer-reviewed, open-access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Open-access journals from all countries and in all languages are accepted for indexing.

DOAJ is financially supported by many libraries, publishers, and other like-minded organizations. Supporting DOAJ demonstrates a firm commitment to open access and the infrastructure that supports it.

Visit: doaj.org

The researcher is a free journal-finding mobile application that helps you to read new journal papers every day that are relevant to your research. It is the most popular mobile application used by more than 3 million scientists and researchers to keep themselves updated with the latest academic literature.

Visit: 10 Best Apps for Graduate Students 

ScienceOpen  is a discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it. It provides context-building services for publishers, to bring researchers closer to the content than ever before. These advanced search and discovery functions, combined with post-publication peer review, recommendation, social sharing, and collection-building features make  ScienceOpen  the only research platform you’ll ever need.

Visit: scienceopen.com

OA.mg is a search engine for academic papers. Whether you are looking for a specific paper, or for research from a field, or all of an author’s works – OA.mg is the place to find it.

Visit: oa.mg

Internet Archive Scholar (IAS) is a full-text search index that includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth-century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

Visit: Sci hub Alternative – Internet Archive Scholar

Citationsy was founded in 2017 after the reference manager Cenk was using at the time, RefMe, was shut down. It was immediately obvious that the reason people loved RefMe — a clean interface, speed, no ads, simplicity of use — did not apply to CiteThisForMe. It turned out to be easier than anticipated to get a rough prototype up.

Visit: citationsy.com

CORE is the world’s largest aggregator of open-access research papers from repositories and journals. It is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open-access mission. We serve the global network of repositories and journals by increasing the discoverability and reuse of open-access content.

It provides solutions for content management, discovery, and scalable machine access to research. Our services support a wide range of stakeholders, specifically researchers, the general public, academic institutions, developers, funders, and companies from a diverse range of sectors including but not limited to innovators, AI technology companies, digital library solutions, and pharma.

Visit: core.ac.uk

Dimensions cover millions of research publications connected by more than 1.6 billion citations, supporting grants, datasets, clinical trials, patents, and policy documents.

Dimensions are the most comprehensive research grants database that links grants to millions of resulting publications, clinical trials, and patents. It

provides up-to-the-minute online attention data via Altmetric, showing you how often publications and clinical trials are discussed around the world. 226m Altmetric mentions with 17m links to publications.

Dimensions include datasets from repositories such as Figshare, Dryad, Zenodo, Pangaea, and many more. It hosts millions of patents with links to other citing patents as well as to publications and supporting grants.

Visit: dimensions.ai

PaperPanda is a Chrome extension that uses some clever logic and the Panda’s detective skills to find you the research paper PDFs you need. Essentially, when you activate PaperPanda it finds the DOI of the paper from the current page, and then goes and searches for it. It starts by querying various Open Access repositories like OpenAccessButton, OaDoi, SemanticScholar, Core, ArXiV, and the Internet Archive. You can also set your university libraries domain in the settings (this feature is in the works and coming soon). PaperPanda will then automatically search for the paper through your library. You can also set a different custom domain in the settings.

Visit: PaperPanda

I Hope, this article would help you to know some of the best websites to download the research papers and journals for free.

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Diary of a phd student, top 15 scopus indexed journals in english literature.

hi im zara,student of art. could you please tell me how i can download the paper and books about painting, sewing,sustainable fashion,graphic and so on. thank a lot

thanks for the informative reports.

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5 free and legal ways to get the full text of research articles

By Carol Hollier on 07-Apr-2021 13:23:17

1.  Use your library if you have one !

If you are affiliated with a university, you probably have free library access to the full text of millions of research articles.   The library will have subscribed to these journals on your behalf. The smartest thing you can do for accessing research articles is familiarize yourself with your own library.

• If you search a database your library will link from the records to the full text if they have it—all you need to do is click through the links.
• When they do not have a copy of an article, a university library can get it for you from another library. This inter-library loan service is usually free to users.
• Your library might use a browser extension like Lean Library or LibKey Nomad to link you to the library subscription or open access full text from wherever you are on the internet.
• Google Scholar lets you configure your account to get links straight to your library’s subscription copy of an article.  But remember--side-by-side to library subscriptions for legitimate research, Google Scholar includes links to articles published in predatory and unreliable journals that would be unwise to credit in your own work.  Learn more about predatory journals.

If you are not affiliated with a university library, there are still ways you can successfully—and legally—get the full text of research articles.

2.  Open Access browser extensions  

More and more research is published Open Access as governments around the world are mandating that research paid for by taxpayer money be freely available to those taxpayers.

Browser extensions have been created to make it easy to spot when the full text of an article is free.   Some of the best are CORE Discovery , Unpaywall and Open Access Button .

Learn more about difference between discovery and access and why it matters for good research: Where to search - Best Practice for Literature Searching - LibGuides at IFIS

3. Google Scholar

You can search the article title inside quotation marks on Google Scholar to see if a link to a copy of the article appears.   If it does, be sure to pay attention to what version of the article you are linking to, to be sure you are getting what you think you’re getting.  These links can lead to an article's published version of record, a manuscript version, or to a thesis or conference proceeding with the same title and author as the article you expected to find.   

4.  Researcher platforms

 A Google Scholar search might lead you to a researcher platform like Academia.edu or ResearchGate .   There, if you set up an account, you can sometimes download or request a copy of the text.  Again, pay attention to which version of the text you get!

5.  Write to the author

If you can’t get a copy by other means, you can write to an article’s corresponding author and (politely!) ask them to send you a copy. Their contact information, usually an email address, will be listed in the information you find about the article, either in a database record for the article or on the publishing journal’s page for it. Many authors are happy to share a copy of their work.

Three bonus ways that might work depending on where you live:

1.  A nearby university library might offer access to articles even if you do not work or study there.

Members of the public are sometimes allowed access to university journal subscriptions through visitor access or a walk-in user service. You usually need to use the collections from a dedicated computer terminal located in a library and may need to make an appointment before you go. Do your research before showing up to make sure you bring the correct documents and equipment (like a flash drive) along.

2.  Try your public library

In some countries, public libraries partner with publishers to give the public access to research articles.   In the UK, for instance, many public libraries participate in the Access to Research scheme, which gives members of the public on-site access to over 30 million academic articles. Contact your local public library to learn what is available to you.

3.  Research4Life

In other countries, your institution might have access to a massive collection of research articles and databases through the publisher/library/United Nations agency initiative Research4Life . Check to see if you already have access, and if not, if your institution might be eligible to join. Membership is only available on an organizational or institutional level.  

Remember —even though you now have a lot of strategies for finding the full text of articles, research should never be led by the articles you can access most easily.

Good research is driven by first figuring out what articles are most relevant to your question and then getting the full text of what you need. One of the best ways to do this is to use a good discipline-specific database, like FSTA for the sciences of food and health.  

Learn more about difference between discovery and access and why it matters for good research:

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Last Updated: May 21, 2023 References

This article was co-authored by Kim Gillingham, MA and by wikiHow staff writer, Jennifer Mueller, JD . Kim Gillingham is a retired library and information specialist with over 30 years of experience. She has a Master's in Library Science from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, and she managed the audiovisual department of the district library center in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, for 12 years. She continues to do volunteer work for various libraries and lending library projects in her local community. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 11,624 times.

If you need original research for a paper or other project, chances are you're going to be looking for scholarly journals. Most of these journals are digitized and available online. However, not all are available for free. Many are contained in databases that require a subscription to access. Once you've found a research article you think you might be able to use, you'll also want to make certain that the article you're reading is primary research. In the sciences, a primary research article discusses a study conducted by the authors of the article and the results of that study, rather than merely summarizing the findings of others. [1] X Research source

Using Free Academic Search Engines

• ScienceDirect ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/search ): covers all science and medical disciplines
• IEEE Xplore ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/guesthome.jsp ): covers computer sciences, electronics, and electrical engineering

Warning: Most academic search engines only provide you the link to a citation and abstract, not the full text of the article. However, you can read the abstract to determine if the article would be helpful for you.

• The guides will tell you how to search the most efficiently, including symbols and punctuation you can add to your searches to limit them and weed out unhelpful results.

• Read the abstract and any other information available about the article to find out if it might be of help to you. Then search the title in quotation marks. If the full text of the article is available on the internet, you'll be able to find it with this search.
• Keep in mind that this search will pull up any pages where the title of the article appears, many of which likely won't include the full text of the article. You may have to dig through a few links to find the full text.
• Some of the links you find will be to a subscription-based database with a paywall. These sites typically won't let you view more than the abstract for free.

Tip: As you're scrolling your search results, look for a link with a PDF extension. These are more likely to be the full text of the article.

• These browser extensions search the web for a full-text copy of the article on the internet. They don't "hack" subscription databases or allow you to access articles illegally. Rather, they search for free copies of the article that already exist.
• For example, the author of the article might have uploaded a PDF of the article on their own website or on their university faculty page. The browser extensions may help you find the article more quickly than you could on your own.

Accessing Scholarly Databases

• If you've already graduated, find out if you can get alumni access to scholarly databases.

Tip: If you're not affiliated with a college or university, talk to the research librarian at your public library. Public libraries often have scholarly database subscriptions as well.

• PubMed ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ ): offered by the National Center for Biotechnology Information in the US. Not all of the articles are free, but you can limit your search to full-text articles.
• Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) ( https://eric.ed.gov/ ): maintained by the Institution of Education Sciences in the US. Not all articles are free, but you can limit your search to full-text.
• NASA Scientific and Technical Information ( https://www.sti.nasa.gov/ ): Provides full-text scientific articles and data sets.

• CORE ( https://core.ac.uk/ ): more than 66 million open access scholarly articles
• ScienceOpen ( https://www.scienceopen.com/ ): more than 28 million articles across all science disciplines
• Directory of Open Access Journals ( https://doaj.org/ ): more than 2 million articles from 9,519 open access journals; multidisciplinary
• Public Library of Science (PLOS) ( https://www.plos.org/ ): publishes 7 open access journals in science fields

Identifying Articles about Primary Research

• The record frequently includes keywords and search terms. Some of these might give you an indication that the article presents original research. For example, one of the keywords or phrases might be "primary research" or "original research." Also, look for words that indicate something new was discovered as a result of the research.
• The title of the article can also help you figure out whether it presents original research. Look for scientific methodology words, such as "sample," which indicate a study was performed.

Tip: If you see an article with the word "review" in the title, it typically does not present original research. However, it does provide an overview and analysis of several studies on the same subject. You can use it to see if any of those studies would help you, then look for those articles.

• If the abstract is written in the first person, you can be assured that the author or authors of the article are going to be talking about a study they conducted themselves. However, many abstracts are written in passive voice to avoid using the first person.

Tip: Use the references to find other primary research articles that the author or authors relied upon when presenting their own findings.

• You can also use the charts and graphs to quickly evaluate the study and determine if the article would be beneficial for you in your paper or project.

Expert Q&A

You might also like.

Expert Interview

Thanks for reading our article! If you’d like to learn more about research, check out our in-depth interview with Kim Gillingham, MA .

• ↑ https://suffolk.libguides.com/c.php?g=654047&p=4589820
• ↑ https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/competitions/finding-and-accessing-scientific-papers
• ↑ Jeremiah Kaplan. Research & Training Specialist. Expert Interview. 2 September 2021.
• ↑ Kim Gillingham, MA. Master's Degree, Library Science, Kutztown University. Expert Interview. 15 May 2019.
• ↑ https://umb.libguides.com/c.php?g=351041&p=2368605
• ↑ https://www.scribendi.com/advice/free_online_journal_and_research_databases.en.html
• ↑ http://umb.libanswers.com/faq/146414

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Explore millions of high-quality primary sources and images from around the world, including artworks, maps, photographs, and more.

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• Part of Cato Institute (Aug. 3, 2021)
• Part of University of California Press
• Part of Open: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture
• Part of Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2012)
• Part of R Street Institute (Nov. 1, 2020)
• Part of Leuven University Press
• Part of UN Secretary-General Papers: Ban Ki-moon (2007-2016)
• Part of Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 12, No. 4 (August 2018)
• Part of Leveraging Lives: Serbia and Illegal Tunisian Migration to Europe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Mar. 1, 2023)
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Harness the power of visual materials—explore more than 3 million images now on JSTOR.

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Free research resources: Journal articles: free online access

• E-books: free online access
• Journal articles: free online access
• Other material: free online access
• Referencing

Introduction

Without access to subscriptions provided by a university library, many journal publications will be locked behind a paywall. Luckily Open Access Publishing and  self archiving  practices have lead to an increasing percentage of these articles being freely readable, published either as Gold Open Access, as preprints or in repositories through Green Open Access.

Preprint articles will not include peer review corrections, so if you are planning to cite an article it is important to refer to the final published version. 

Google Scholar can be the best place to start when looking for an article, as it automatically provides links to many Open Access articles, institutional and subject repositories, preprint servers and academic social networks, as you can see in the example on this page.

• Find out more about Self Archiving Authors can make their research freely available by "self archiving". This includes the distribution of preprints and "green" Open Access

Browser extensions

If you come across a specific article which is behind a paywall, you can try to find an Open Access version by searching in Google Scholar or use browser extensions which give an alternate route.

All three examples below are designed to link to an Open Access PDF of an article directly from the publishers website. Each has a different interface and will produce slightly different results.

• Unpaywall Harvests Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and makes it easy to find, track, and use. Just install the extension to the Chrome browser for easy access to over 28 million open access articles.
• Open Access Button Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors.
• CORE discovery Backed by the CORE dataset of Open Access papers Core Discovery gives one click access to full texts from Institutional Repositories and other sources.
• Comparison of Unpaywall and Open Access Button Willi Hooper, M.D., 2017. Review of Unpaywall [Chrome & Firefox browser extension]. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 5(1), p.eP2190.

Your local library

Many public libraries in the UK can help you access journal articles through the Access to Research service. Free access is available to academic articles from most large publishers through library computers. This is a "walk-in" service, so you'll have to visit your local library in person and ask your librarian. A map of participating locations is available through the link below.

• Access to research

University repositories

Universities usually mandate that their authors deposit a copy of any articles they publish into their institutional repository. This will either be the final published version of the article, or an "accepted manuscript" (the peer reviewed text and author's final draft, without a publisher's typesetting). 

Many repositories are indexed by Google Scholar, so a PDF will appear available to download in the search results. If not, the 'all versions' button can provide links to other options. Here you can see an example of a PDF provided by the University of Reading's repository, CentAUR.

You can search across many repositories using search engines such as Google, Google Scholar or specialist Open Access tools such as CORE. You can also search a university’s repository directly if you are interested in the research of a particular author or a research department.

If you are struggling to find a specific repository try browsing OpenDOAR, the global directory of Open Access Repositories.

• OpenDOAR OpenDOAR is a directory of Open Access repositories with Global coverage. You can search the directory by name or browse geographically.

Pre-print servers

In some disciplines it is common to share research on a pre-print server before it is published in a journal. These are a particularly important source when you want to access the most recent research in a fast moving area. 

These papers have not yet been through peer review and so if you are using these as part of your studies, you need to be aware of this. Often fellow researchers may comment on the articles and, as a result, the paper may be modified and also later published in a fully peer reviewed form in a journal. Pre-print servers tend to be organised along subject lines and have become a significant communication outlet for new research for several subject areas. Items from pre-print servers are now included in bibliographic databases such as Scopus but should be clearly identifiable as non-peer reviewed. 

• ArXiv Large collection of free downloadable non-peer reviewed scholarly articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.
• AgriRxiv Free, open access source of unpublished (non-peer reviewed) preprints across the agricultural and allied sciences. It is hosted and managed by CABI, an international, inter-governmental, not-for-profit organization. As well as agriculture, it covers soil science, water resources and environmental science.
• bioRxiv A free online archive for unpublished and non-peer reviewed pre-prints in the life sciences
• EarthArXiv A pre-print server containing non-peer reviewed papers in the earth sciences
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network) Leading social science online library of free full-text and abstracted scholarly research papers deposited by academics.

Researchers sharing their own articles

Researchers are usually keen to share their own articles. It's common for them to do this either on academic social networks (Academia.edu and Researchgate are the most common) or on their own personal websites. If you've exhausted all other options in this guide, consider contacting an author directly. They may well be happy to share it with you by email.

• ResearchGate ResearchGate is a commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.
• Academia.edu Academia.edu is a for-profit American social networking website for academics. The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field.
• << Previous: E-books: free online access
• Next: Other material: free online access >>
• Last Updated: Jul 19, 2023 9:49 AM
• URL: https://libguides.reading.ac.uk/freeresearchresources

How to Get a Paper Published in an Academic Journal in 9 Steps | Beginner's Guide

Updated February 4, 2022

Publishing in a journal can sometimes be challenging or even discouraging. Often, beginners struggle to get published in a good journal even if their work is of good quality because it lacks the finesse and attention to detail that a more experienced researcher’s work has.

Even though you may initially face a few rejections, if you make the necessary changes (suggested by reviewers) and keep improving the manuscript each time, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll get published in a good journal soon.

This article will show you some beginner tips and tricks on how to get a journal article published step by step:

1. Ask a librarian for advice

Librarians are probably the ones that know most about the kind of articles that get published, and the kind of journals institutions are willing to pay for - after all, they spend their whole time lending and arranging them. They can offer you insights on what topic to choose for your research (and whether it’s too broad or too narrow) and help you select the best library resource to find sources (books, ebooks, videos, online videos, articles), find the best words and phrases to type in, and evaluate and cite the sources you find.

2. Publish with a supervisor

One way to get a head start is to publish your first few articles with a supervisor as co-author . Since they are more likely to have a substantial number of publications and a known name in the field, it will make it easier for you to get published in a renowned journal.

If that’s not possible, persevere! The process might be demotivating, but trying over and over again, and using tools such as online publishing platforms will put you on a sure path to having published research papers.

3. Find a good title

You might think that coming up with a title for your article is easy, but sometimes, this is the hardest part. That’s because, unfortunately, many readers decide from the title if they even want to read the article or not , so this aspect is of the utmost importance. A good title should be concise without sacrificing any relevant elements and should capture the readers’ attention by being brief, simple, and attractive.

A title longer than 10-12 words will seem unfocused, so make sure also to use appropriate descriptive words, active verbs and avoid unnecessary phrases. You don’t want to take readers’ attention away from an important point.

4. Have a good research question

It would be best if you focused on the quality of your work. Explore the gaps in the existing literature and find a unique research question . Choosing a topic that will advance knowledge is important.

A well-defined research question makes a good initial impression on peer reviewers and journal editors. Additionally, a clearly defined research question increases chances of publication because it gives researchers better clarity on developing the study protocol, designing the study, and analyzing the data.

Pro tip - if you develop a habit of regularly reading scientific literature, this will give you an idea of the existing problems in your field of interest. You can then choose one of these problems to expand upon and find a research question in this way.

5. Plan a literature search

After landing on a research question, you need to plan an extensive literature search . You can use books, journal articles, government reports, online databases, etc., in your research, and you will also need to note important citations that you come across. Make sure to keep a written record of your searches, as this will come in handy when writing the final version of your manuscript.

6. Plan a good structure and stick to it

To ensure that your manuscript conveys your ideas effectively, you have to make sure that you have a good structure . An original research article typically follows an IMRaD format . This includes:

• Introduction - clearly explain what you are studying and why. The context of the study is just as important as readers need to understand what they’re reading.
• Materials and methods - include what you did and how you went about gathering and conducting your research. Usually, if you conduct your research well, other researchers can reproduce the results you achieved by following the methods you have detailed in your manuscript.
• Results and discussion - detail if you were able to solve the problem you outlined in the introduction. It’s crucial to include complete details and data in this section. The discussion section covers the implications and meaning of your findings to understand the impact of your research.
• Conclusion - state the immediate results of your study while highlighting the problem you started with and what you learned throughout your research.

7. Format the article

Once you have your manuscript ready, it’s time for the formatting. You can follow more standard formatting based on a widely used style guide in your field. However, some journals follow a particular type of formatting style, so you may have to reformat your article before resubmission to a different publication.

Following the more general guidelines will make it easier for you to reformat articles, if necessary.

8. Select a journal

Once your manuscript is ready for publishing, it’s time to select a suitable journal . This step is important because this is the time when you can receive peer reviews, so make sure that once you have these reviews or comments, you incorporate as many as possible. This will help you improve your manuscript and get it published eventually, even if it’s initially rejected.

To select a suitable journal, a great place to start looking is your reference list. Many online journal selection tools, such as Journal Suggester , can also help you narrow down choices. Additionally, you may send submission inquiries to three or four journals simultaneously, then submit your article to the journal that shows the most interest.

To help you choose a suitable journal to publish your research, read about how to validate the right journal .

9. Openly communicate with editors

Submission of an article involves communication with an editor. Editors:

• select things such as content,
• manage peer review for accuracy of submissions,
• oversee the editorial college,
• ensure the integrity of the scientific record.

Knowing the roles and responsibilities of editors is important because queries, questions, and responses to critiques can come up while documents are being completed. Often, questions arise in the course of reviewing a manuscript , so editors query authors to obtain additional information. These queries need to be addressed straightforwardly to resolve potential issues.

These are the most important steps you should follow to publish your work. Take into account who the reader is, find a good title and research question, be aware of how you write and go on from there. The publishing industry is as complex as it is anxiety-inducing. You can have the perfect paper yet struggle with your options and the submission system can be a mess. That’s why we made Orvium.

At Orvium, we enable researchers to simplify the process of publishing their articles. We help manage the entire process, from submission to review to finally publishing your paper. Among the features to improve your manuscript , we offer open collaboration, a choice of what kind of peer review you want, and full traceability of your paper.  

Get started with peer reviews from experts in your field, and get your paper published with us faster . Also, make sure to check out our website and blog to read more about our collaborations and contributions, as well as relevant new topics in the scientific world.

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