How to Get Research Papers for Free

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If you are a research scholar, a Ph.D, M.Tech or M.Phil student, chance are, you probably are stuck up in finding the research papers.

Most of the reputed institutes do have a subscription to one or the another journal, but many institutes just plain ignore the need of a subscription.
So, where do we look for the research papers and get them for free?

Here are the various options that I have come across while searching for research papers during my research work. No one solution apply for everyone but I am pretty sure any one of these options will certainly be help you out.

  1. Free (Legal) Options:

    1. http//scholar.google.com:  

      You probably know about this. But what you probably could have missed is the option "All 'x' versions" option below the search result. Using this option, you can look for all the copies of the paper at different locations over the web. 
    2. http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl:  

      This Stanford university site does list many reputed journals. Some of them are completely free and some have past 12 months of free issues. 
    3. http://openj-gate.org/:  

      This is open access version of J-Gate. I have not personally tried it, but it seems a promising option.
    4. http://www.researchgate.net/:  

      This is a great option of you do have email id on your institute domain. e.g. xyz@institute.com. ResearchGate has a large database of research papers and also a very good platform to publish your research work/draft of research work.  So, if you have an email id of your institute or can arrange one from anyone, go ahead, and grab the opportunity... :)
    5. Ask the author:

      I know this may sound little weird, but this could probably be a very good option as many of the researchers are interested in getting their work ahead, also, it popularizes him/her to be included as the base paper of new researches.
      Tip: Try to contact the last author. He/she is often the Boss: The main researcher.



  2. Free (Illegal) Options:

    1. http://sci-hub.org:

      This is the MOST POWERFUL option. This probably NEVER Fails. This is the grand daddy of piracy in Technical Papers. The servers may some times seem to be down. This is temporary and they are back up very soon. Also, if the servers are down, you can also refer to the next option, which is essentially, an alternative way to sci-hub.org. The way to use it is that you need to enter the url of your paper. The url which on clicking takes you to the page that asks to pay for the paper to download.
    2. http://libgen.org/scimag/:
      This is the alternative way to get into and search the servers of sci-hub.org. There are a few options like “Redirect” which you should probably use carefully.  it redirects you to google scholar search if nothing is found.
    3. http://booksc.org/:
      This is a similar site to sci-hub.org.
    4. http://www.freefullpdf.com/:
      This is a similar site to sci-hub.org.

Finally, always try to use the legal options as, its always better to be on the right side of the law. But may be under certain circumstances, critical to you, you might be forced to use those other options. In any case, go ahead, and start finding your research papers/journal articles. But do always use your conscious.

Happy Researching!!!

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