Download Research Papers and Scientific Articles for free

(Sci-Hub link updated January 15th, 2018)

January 15, 2018
https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific-articles-free-sci-hub/

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 you can use to download journal articles, these are my top four. Email
me if you know of any more.

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.

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

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 Sci-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 it’s decidedly in the gray area legally. Just enter the
DOI to download the papers you need for free.

In case that link to Sci-Hub doesn’t work, try these new Sci-Hub links:
80.82.77.83
http://sci-hub.la
http://tree.sci-hub.la
https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link
sci-hub.tv
sci-hub.hk

Of course, after reading a scientific article / paper you’ll want to reference it in your essay.
You can use Citationsy to create citations.