What are effective ways to find scientific articles?

Effective literature searching can be divided into three main components: searching, finding, and accessing.

How can you search effectively?

• Keywords: Use precise, field-specific terms. Include synonyms, related terms, and spelling variations to broaden your scope while staying relevant.

• Boolean operators: Combine terms with AND, OR, and NOT to refine or expand results. For example: “climate change AND migration” narrows the search to studies addressing both topics.

• Filters: Narrow results by publication year, language, author affiliation, or article type (for example, review or empirical research).

• Subject headings: Employ standardized vocabularies such as MeSH in PubMed for consistent retrieval across databases.

• Search balance: Begin broad to scan the field. Narrow down for depth once you identify key terms and sources.

• Citation tracking:

  • Reference lists: Reveal the foundational works that shaped the article.

  • Cited-by tools: Show newer publications that build upon the article.

• How can you stay updated?

  • Set up alerts in Google Scholar or discipline-specific databases for new work.

  • Subscribe to journal newsletters or RSS feeds.

  • Use academic networks such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu to follow researchers and access their latest output.

Where can you find articles?

General search engines and broad databases

• Google Scholar: Free, accessible, and covers a wide range of disciplines. Useful for quick orientation.

• Science.gov: A U.S. government portal that provides access to federally funded research and datasets.

Discipline-specific databases

• Life Sciences: PubMed Central (PMC) for biomedical literature, Web of Science for cross-disciplinary indexing, ScienceDirect for peer-reviewed journals.

• Physical Sciences: INSPEC for engineering and physics, AIP Scitation for physics, MathSciNet for mathematics.

• Social Sciences: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for citations, PsycINFO for psychology, JSTOR for older and interdisciplinary literature.

• Humanities: MLA International Bibliography for literature and linguistics, Historical Abstracts for history, Philosopher’s Index for philosophy.

Other sources

• Grey literature: Theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, and technical reports can provide data not published elsewhere.

• Preprint servers: arXiv, PsyArXiv, and SocArXiv contain early versions of articles before peer review.

• Institutional repositories: Universities often host open access versions of their researchers’ work.

How can you access full-text articles?

Open access options

• Open access journals: Many journals publish articles freely online, either fully OA or hybrid.

• Preprints and postprints: Authors often upload early versions (preprints) or accepted manuscripts (postprints) to repositories, even if the final version is paywalled.

• Public repositories: Funders such as the NIH require research to be deposited in platforms like PubMed Central.

Library-based access

• Library subscriptions: University or institutional libraries provide access to a wide range of journals. Remote access is usually possible via VPN or proxy login.

• Interlibrary loan (ILL): Borrow articles or books from other libraries if not available in your own.

• Document delivery services: Some libraries offer direct delivery of scanned articles upon request.

Author and researcher sharing

• Direct author contact: Most researchers are happy to share a PDF if you email them.

• Academic networks: Platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu allow you to request or download articles directly from the author.

• Professional societies and mailing lists: Membership often includes journal access or article sharing within the community.

Alternative access tools

• Unpaywall: A browser extension that automatically finds free legal versions of paywalled articles.

• CORE and OpenAIRE: Aggregators of open access research across disciplines.

• National and public libraries: In some countries, large public or national libraries provide journal access to registered users.