Dumb Questions Thread

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HenrySwanson
What is the most cost effective way to access journals if you aren't a student/don't work for a university?
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The best thing to do is e-mail one of the authors of the paper you're interested in. They worked incredibly hard on their paper and most of the time will be willing to share it with you. They don't see money from the publications so they're probably not going to tell you that you need to buy the journal.

Plenty of libraries carry various journals. You might need to poke around to find the one you're looking for, but chance are libraries in major cities should have them.

CORE is another good place to look: https://core.ac.uk/
 
I'm not sure how feasible that is as I want to do a semi-literature review.

My friend's OpenAthens login gets me access to BMJ Best Practice and Uptodate....but I don't think it unlocks any articles that aren't already free to view that I've found through PubMed.
 
HenrySwanson
I'm not sure how feasible that is as I want to do a semi-literature review.

My friend's OpenAthens login gets me access to BMJ Best Practice and Uptodate....but I don't think it unlocks any articles that aren't already free to view that I've found through PubMed.
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arXiv is an option, it has a lot of stuff but often not the really big papers.

As far as I know Alexandra Elbakyan's little website is still going. If you're going to use the stuff for any sort of commercial purpose that's probably not a good idea, but if it's just for personal research it's very convenient.

Depending on what your subject matter area is sometimes you can find forums or the like which will have archives of material and/or people with access who can help.

Googling by DOI or the exact title + "pdf" sometimes gets you results, but you'd probably have to do it with something other than actual Google these days. And have all your adblockers and stuff on for whatever website you get sent to.

As others have said, email the author is really the only surefire way. You can build a list of papers you want from abstracts and references, and you'll often find that the same half dozen or so people have probably done 80% of the research you're interested in.
 

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