free peer-reviewed scientific articles? (I'm looking for some articles to incorporate some facts into a paper I'm writing on language.)
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Have you tried Google Scholar?
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Your university will have large numbers of subscriptions to online services providing these. What's more, you can still use Google Scholar to search most of those, just sign into your school's VPN (or do the search while on a campus network).
You can likely find out about other ways to find articles through your library (possibly on its web page).
Posted by Mr.Funny (Member # 4467) on :
Yeah, Google Scholar is awesome.
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
Your school library should have a subscription to JSTOR, which is an online source for the majority of published academic journals in English from the last century. Go to your school website and look for an "online database" link.
Its really a shame that most students aren't even aware that the majority of library periodicals are all accessible online. I can't tell you how many times I've listened to someone say they can never find something, and then I find what they needed in about 2 minutes of looking....
Posted by Amilia (Member # 8912) on :
I wouldn't bother using GoogleScholar to search your library's subscription databases. The databases themselves have much more powerful search features built in. Also, they will allow you to limit you search to peer-reviewed journals, which Scholar will not.
If you are not sure which database will have the information you need, be aware that many vendors will allow you to do cross-database searching. For example, you can search for a keyword in any or all of the databases that EBCSOhost offers. Likewise CSA.
If you want to search Google for scholarly articles, here are a couple tips: go to Advanced Search. Under File Format, choose PDF. Most scholarly articles are published in this format. Use "abstract" as one of your keywords. The articles you are looking for will contain an abstract, and it will usually be labeled as such.
Good Luck.
Posted by Shigosei (Member # 3831) on :
I like using PubMed when I'm looking for anything vaguely biology-related. If you don't think you'll have access to the articles (if you're not on a university system, basically), there's also PubMed Central.
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
Public Library of Science may give you what you're looking for.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Amilia: my experience is that, if you're familiar with massaging google, its far more powerful for most keyword-based searches. Additionally, since it straddles more databases, its extremely useful for tracking references forward or backward (especially forward, as few journal databases even bother trying to keep a limited subset of that information).
For searches reliant on other metadata, like author, date, abstract-only searching, et cetera, the journal databases are often better.