Citationsy
Hacking Education

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Citationsy now has a built-in function that lets you search for papers and download them from Sci-Hub called Citationsy Archives.
Sign up here (it’s free!)

After my post on Chrome Extensions for academics and students I heard from a lot of my readers, especially about Sci-Hub extension. They hadn’t heard of Sci Hub before this and were astounded that you could get academic papers for free. So I thought a follow-up post on exactly this might be helpful.

There are several websites besides sci.hub that you can use to download journal articles, these are my top three four five. Email me if you know of any more.

 

Update: Citationsy now has a built-in function that lets you search for papers and download them right there called Citationsy Archives.
Sign up here (it’s free!)

 

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.

 

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.

 

ResearchGate

If you look up the author of the paper you want to download on the academic platform ResearchGate you will often find that they have shared their work for download right there. And even if they haven’t you can write to them and ask if they might send it to you.

 

Library Genesis

Library Genesis is a database of over 2 million (yes, million) papers, articles, entire journals, and non-fiction books. They also have comics, fiction books, and books in many non-english languages.

Alternative links:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec
http://libgen.pw
http://libgen.io

 

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 open access services, including sci.hub

Sign up here

 

Sci-Hub

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 Sci-Hub, but shi hub is decidedly in the gray area legally. Just enter the DOI to download the papers you need for free from schihub.

In case that link to Sci-Hub doesn’t work, try these new SciHub links:
sci-hub.se
scihub.mu
sci-hub.nu
sci-hub.tw
scihub.hk
sci.hub.gq
sci-hub.ga
scı hub.is
sci.hub.la
tree.sci-hub.la
scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link
sci-hub.tv
http://sci-hub.mn
scı hub.name
scihub.biz
80.82.77.83

 
 

Of course, after reading a scientific article / paper on sci.hub you’ll want to reference it in your essay.
You can use Citationsy to create citations. It’s free!
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