Hacking Education

× Citationsy is perhaps the world’s best reference generator. Citationsy now has a built-in function that lets you search for free papers and download them called Citationsy Archives. Citationsy is perhaps the world’s best reference generator. Citationsy now has a built-in function that lets you search for free papers and download them called Citationsy Archives. Sign up (it’s free)



Get Started now Update: Citationsy now has a built-in function that lets you search for free papers and download them right there called Citationsy Archives.

Many students and researchers need to find a paper for their research, to complete the review of an article, or while writing their thesis. Many papers can be found through your university library, but for those that you may not have access to through your institution, we take a look at the three largest open access sites, as well as sci hub and Library Genesis.

Unpaywall

Unpaywall is a website built by Impactstory, a nonprofit working to make science more open and reusable online. They are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. What they do is gather all the articles they can from all the open-access repositories on the internet. These are papers that have been provided by the authors or publishers for free, and thus Unpaywall is completely legal. They say they have about 50-85% of all scientific articles available in their archive. Works with Chrome or Firefox.

Kopernio

Kopernio is a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera that gives you one-click legal access to journal articles. It automatically searches your library journal subscriptions, open databases, PubMed and Google Scholar to find full-text PDFs.

Open Access Button

The Open Access Button does something very similar to Unpaywall, with some major differences. They search thousands of public repositories, and if the article is not in any of them they send a request to the author to make the paper publicly available with them. The more people try to find an article through them, the more requests an author gets. You can search for articles/papers directly from their page, or download their browser extension.

Library Genesis

Library Genesis is a database of over 5 million (yes, million) free papers, articles, entire journals, and non-fiction books. They also have comics, fiction books, and books in many non-english languages. They are also known as LibGen or Genesis Library. Many of the papers on Library Genesis are the same as sci hub, but what sets them apart is that Library Genesis has books as well.

Citationsy Archives

Citationsy Archives lets you search for journal articles and papers, download them, and of course cite them in your Citationsy projects.

After entering a query it searches through all published papers in the world and shows you the matches. You can then click a result to see more details, and immediately cite it from there.

It will also let you download the paper through a couple different, completely legal open access services.

Sign up here

Sci-Hub (link updated August 2020)

Finally, there’s Sci Hub. Science-Hub works in a completely different way than the other two: researchers, students, and other academics donate their institutional login to Schi-Hub, and when you search for a paper they download it through that account. After the articles has been downloaded they store a copy of it on their own servers. You can basically download 99% of all scientific articles and papers on SciHub. Just enter the DOI to download the papers you need for free from scihub.

Shihub was launched by the researcher Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 with the goal of providing free access to research to everyone, not only those who have the money to pay for journals. Many in the scientific community praise hub-sci / sciencehub for furthering the knowledge of humankind and helping academics from all over the world. shi hub has been sued many times by publishers like Elsevier but it is still accessible, for example by using a sci hub proxy.

You can find links to Sci-Hub on Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub ) or WikiData ( https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21980377#P856 ).

Of course, after reading a journal article / paper on sci.hub you’ll want to reference it in your essay.

You can use Citationsy to create citations. It’s free!

Go to Citationsy →