

Ask HN: Where do you get your scientific papers from? - ComputerGuru

Given the recent hubbub about ACM's money-seeking ways, I'm wondering where HN members get their scientific research papers from?<p>I'm currently both an IEEE and ACM member; I find the IEEE digital library to be somewhat of a joke - ACM is much better in comparison, but still lacking.<p>I don't like putting 100 bucks in a million different organizations in order to be able to search for science (which should be open to all!) so this begs the question: what's the most cost-efficient method of obtaining scientific papers for research? Also, what resource has the best search engine for said papers (both ACM's and IEEE's engines suck)?<p>Thanks!
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zitterbewegung
ArXiv usually has most of the scientific papers that I read. Google Scholar
gets the rest. But probably the best place is looking up the author an finding
his personal website and downloading papers. EDIT: Also check with your
university if they have an agreement for papers.

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teuobk
A few different places, depending on the situation:

1\. Google scholar

2\. Authors' personal websites

3\. EBSCO Academic Alumni Edition via my alma matter's alumni association

4\. Email requests to friends who are currently enrolled at major universities

5\. Visits to the local university (Minnesota) library, which offers terminals
for free public access to journals

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cperciva
Google scholar can usually find PDFs which authors' posted to their personal
websites.

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keefe
I use <http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/> and ACM digital library and sometimes
google scholar

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russell
I thought I would try a couple of the suggestions here. What I was looking for
was criticisms or alternatives to (Java) exception handling, an interest of
mine. ArXiv may have the the paper but their search interface is pretty
primitive. Google Scholar gave much more useful results after tinkering with
search terms.

My usual approach to finding papers in a new area of interest is to google
around until I find a Wikipedia article that looks like a good starting point.
I have found Wikipedia itself to be pretty hopeless for searches. In the
article or some of those that it links to, I usually find researchers working
in my area of interest. Of particular value are survey articles because of the
large number of references. Then I follow the authors to their research
departments and projects and co-workers. That usually provides a week of
reading.

If I'm looking for something serendipitous I read the comments here and follow
the links.

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scott_s
In my (admittingly limited) experience with ArXiv, CS is not well represented.
Most CS researchers just don't put their papers up on it.

Try searching on the ACM Digital Library. When you find a title, Google for it
(doesn't even need to be Scholar), and you'll often find the author's copy on
their webpage.

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ottbot
I'm interested in what turns up here, outside of arxiv - I have no clue, short
of the odd self distributed paper.

I'm very much dependent on university journal subscriptions to get full text
articles - mostly from sciencedirect. It's a shame, as it puts so much stuff
out of reach if you're not in the same position.

I think in the CS and math fields arxiv can be very useful, but papers in my
field (mostly CFD related) are fairly sparse.

It might be worth seeing if you can still get access from your university,
even if you no longer attend or are affiliated/employed. I know mine offers
library services to students after graduation (for life I think), which I
assume includes access to journals.

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ComputerGuru
Our university doesn't even offer this while you're studying there, most
unfortunately.

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chasingsparks
filetype:pdf title

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naz
Sometimes you can get books this way too but a lot of the time it is just a
preview of a first chapter. Another way is to search for a non-prominent
quotation from the book with filetype:pdf.

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brooksbp
Author's personal websites...

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ivan_ah
Usually universities have electronic subscriptions for most journals based on
the IP range of the university network.

I ssh one of the computers on campus. cd to my public_html directory and use
elinks to download the pdf.

I think many people do this trick because I keep finding good papers in
various ~username/ folders indexed by google.

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pbiggar
I wrote a firefox plugin to help solve this problem. See
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/45524/>.

So far it only replaces the link on portal.acm.org with a google scholar
search. Contributions beyond this are welcome.

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dagw
I've managed to keep my university affiliations since graduating so I still
have access to most archives for free via my university library.

Once that stops working I guess my next approach would be to mail a friendly
request to one of my friends still in the academic world and have them
download the pdf for me.

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Locke1689
Many universities have alumni "library" programs, where you pay a certain fee
to gain access to the university's library. As a student, I've never had to
use it though and simply showing up to a site with my university's domain name
(VPN) pretty much lets me in anywhere.

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bmaland
<http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/>

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whyenot
Google Scholar.

In California at least, you can also get pdfs of papers at most UC and CSU
libraries without being a student. Stanford too, last time I tried. Of course
this means you do actually have to physically go to the library in most cases.

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eggoa
<http://arxiv.org/>

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robk
mendeley.com

