Finding scientific papers for free: contributions from our readers

I never thought that writing a blog would provide such a wonderful chance to learn from the community. In these past few days, I have learned so much from readers about finding and accessing information. Now, I want to share their knowledge with those of you who might not be checking the comments sections of my posts. I'm sure you, too, will be thankful for their contribution.

The first set of great suggestions is here

and next, the real information experts, the librarians chime in and demonstrate why they are the experts on finding information.

Be sure to read all the way to the bottom or search for CogSciLibrarian. I suspect that this librarian can find any media that's been in print or other published form.

Read the whole series:

  • part I A day in the life of an English physician,
  • part II Comparing different methods,
  • part III My new favorite method,
  • part IV One last experiment

More like this

My suggestion, and perhaps the most obvious one: the PLoS journals. No, there aren't a lot of archives to search through yet, and it's no Science or Nature, but...it's all free.

We have an network map visualization of related concepts as extracted from PubMed here:
http://www.curehunter.com/public/dictionary.do

Please give it a try if you get the chance.

If anyone would like a trial account for the medical research interface beta, please drop me a note at alex at curehunter dot com.

Nothing like a comment two years behind the fact...but there are useful features in PubMed that can really help with finding free articles.

Set up a MyNCBI account (tab is in the top right-hand corner of PubMed). It's free. Follow the directions.

What can you do with this? First thing is that you can set filters...tabs like the one for "review articles".
Filters include "free articles" and "PubMedCentral articles." When you sign in to your PubMed account, each search you do will automatically sort out the free and PMC articles. You don't have to do the search twice, you don't have to set the limits.

You can also filter for articles in journals subscribed to by a library you have access to.

And with a MyNCBI account, you can have searches run automatically--daily, weekly, monthly, whatever you choose--with a notice sent to your email account whenever there are new articles on your topic added to the database.

PubMed's interface is due to change quite a bit in August 09, so the location of tabs and links may change then.

Thanks M.!

All great suggestions. I guess it's time, well maybe after August, it will be time for an updated post with new screen shots.