
Ask HN: How do non-academic people find related papers to an specific topic? - Francute
Let&#x27;s say i&#x27;m interested in a topic that I can&#x27;t find formal discussions through Google. How do I find related papers to my topic?
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kratom_sandwich
I don't think that the research process is different for academics and non-
academics since most databases are publicly available (although the actual
papers might be not).

If you have already found a paper on your topic, locate that paper in a field-
specific database (e.g. RePEc for economics, IEEE for computer science, the
Web of Science for a more general database, PubMed for medicine, ...) and look
at cited and citing articles which are relevant. Also, search for other
publications by the same author.

If you don't have a paper on the topic: I believe that some databases offer a
list of keywords, so you might wanna look at that list and see if anything
relevant pops up.

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gus_massa
You are probably using the wrong keyword. One trick is to select the article
that is closer to the topic you want, and try to pick a few keyword from that
article. And then iterate this. Sometimes it converges to the right location.

(What topic? Perhaps we can help.)

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yesenadam
Apart from Google scholar, search in Library Genesis scientific papers search.
Once you have a result, can click on journal title to check out everything in
each issue.

[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/)

I think it's same database as SciHub, but LibGen has keyword/author search,
don't need exact paper title. So useful!! Only gives the first 100 results
though..

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byoung2
You can do advanced Google searches:

healthcare disparities among transgender patients "doi" after:2015:09-01

When you find an interesting article, use the doi number (e.g.
10.1371/journal.pone.0156210) here to get the full article:

[http://sci-hub.tw/](http://sci-hub.tw/)

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muzani
I normally look for books that summarize the topic, skim them, then search
references for the paper detailing it.

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PaulHoule
I search on PubMed for biomedical topics.

