Scientific papers

Any sources to get scientific papers for my own interest? Doesn't really matter if available as torrents or on the web to view. Thanks in advance!

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You could try Sci-Hub and LibGen. If you don't find what you're looking for, you can always email the authors or other scholars who may have access to the paper you're interested in. A less alternative site would be arXiv, but it just has preprints.
- Emailing the author has quite a good succes rate. Many just forced to use a publisher to get it out but love giving their paper to those who are interested.
  Atleast that's my experience in trying to get certain papers for my studies.
- sometimes paper is also available at researchgate

Not a piracy answer, but email the author(s). Most are excited that someone is taking interest in their work and will gladly send you the paper.
- Yeah that seems the most appropriate way to read them ngl. Would definitely try emailing them first and if they dont respond then look onto the other options other wise people have commented.
  
  Many Profs or labs will have a website where the paper is hosted too. It used to be that you could host on ResearchGate but publishers stamp that out routinely.

I've heard you can just email one of the authors of the paper, if you're looking for a specific one.
- Specifically, the corresponding author (which should have their email listed in the publication)
  Keep in mind you may get an "uncorrected proof" or "author copy" since many authors don't want to run afoul of their publisher's guidelines on giving out copies

Scihub for most things. You can also sometimes find preprints (or contact the authors) on RG.

Sci-hub almost has everything, but you can access the rest by using a University account that pays for access
- Unfortunately I'm not in University. Just reading them for personal learning. Thanks for the suggestion though!
  
  Depending on your country, a local public library may also have access to these databases

sci-hub has already been mentioned, but I will say that though it is not piracy, depending on the field, you can find free version "pre-prints" of papers on arxiv.org and socarxiv.org

arxiv
- Many publications on arxiv (or biorxiv or medrxiv, etc) are early drafts, or otherwise not scientifically rigorous and wouldn't be published in an actual journal due to failing peer review. Take what you find there with a grain of salt.
  Although you should also take any single peer-reviewed article with a grain of salt as well.
- arxiv has a narrow scope, there's also biorxiv.org but both are for preprints which is a little bit different thing

A lot of research can be downloaded if it's open access. If it is not, you can request papers to the authors, this is really easy in platforms like ResearchGate. Others have also mentioned SciHub if you are okay with the arrr option.

24 comments