You need to read a lot of other papers from the scientific literature before you can write your own paper. You need to download some papers and read them to understand what’s going on in the field, or maybe to get some methods for your experiments. And so you have to collect a lot of papers. If you are at a university, chances are that your university library subscribes to most of the journals that you need. But, they probably don’t subscribe to all of the journals that you need. And you try to get that paper, click on download PDF, and this message pops up: purchase this article.

And the price to purchase the article might be nine dollars or more. I’ve seen it go up to sixty dollars. And that’s really expensive if you need five, ten, or twenty articles. So how do you get those articles? Or maybe you’re not at a university at all, and so you don’t have access to journals that are not open access.

The first way that you can get a journal article only applies if you are a student, staff, or faculty at a university. Even if your university library does not subscribe to that particular journal, you can contact the library and ask for an interlibrary loan, or ILL as we call it in the United States. Your library has a network of other university libraries, and when you request an interlibrary loan, they will put out a request for this article, and one of those other universities in the network will give it to your university, and they will give it to you. For every university I’ve been affiliated with where I’ve used interlibrary loan, it has been free for me to get that article. The library has to pay their network, but that’s built into their budget, so don’t feel bad about when you make your request to say that you’re not willing to pay for the article. That’s perfectly normal.

The second way that you can get an article that’s behind a paywall is to go to ResearchGate.net. At ResearchGate, enter the title of the article or one of the authors. See if they have a page on the site where they have uploaded a copy of that article. A surprising number of times when I’ve looked for an article that’s behind a paywall, I found it on ResearchGate. If that author has a profile and they have not uploaded the paper you need, there’s a button on ResearchGate where you can request the paper from the author. If you click that button the author might provide it for you. They might not, but that’s a good way to ask for it.

The third way that you can look for an article that’s behind a paywall is Google. If I’ve tried Google Scholar and there’s no PDF version of the article, then I just switch over to regular Google and I enter the title and search for it that way. And surprisingly, a lot of times I find the PDF on regular Google, because university has a repository where they’ve uploaded it, or maybe the author has a personal website where they’ve uploaded it. So regular Google has worked for me a lot of times when I need an article that’s behind a paywall.

The fourth method that you can try to get that article that’s behind the paywall is to search for it on PubMed. If it’s a biomedical related topic, chances are you’ll find the article on PubMed, and if that article was published using funds from NIH research, then it’s required to be made public and there will be a copy of it on PubMed. Tip number four and a half this is related to that. Look on JSTOR, a non-profit organization that has tens of thousands of articles archived on their site.

Method number five has worked for me a lot of times, and this is just simply emailing one of the authors. Either the first author or the last author, or whoever is the corresponding author. The corresponding author has been designated as the person to correspond with whoever needs to correspond about that article. I’ll just write a simple email to the author saying:

Dear Dr. X.

I am doing research on a topic and I came across your paper (list the title of it), but I cannot get a copy of it because my library doesn’t have a subscription to that journal. Could you please provide a preprint in the form of a PDF?

Sincerely,

Brian Waters

Now when I send that email, almost every time the author will send me a copy of the paper because they want their work to go out. They know that the more people that read their paper, the more people that will cite their paper, and that gives it more impact. So simply contacting the author a lot of times will get you that PDF that you need.

Tip number six is to crowdsource it. If you are on social media chances are you have friends/followers/connections who are also scientists, and maybe you have friends all over the world that are scientists. So put it out on Twitter, put it out on LinkedIn, put it out on Facebook saying, hey friends in my network, I need this paper. Here’s the title, here’s the citation information. Can somebody please send it to me? And it probably will pay off. Somebody will be able to send that paper to you.

Time for the seventh idea. I really don’t want to call it a tip, but I feel like I need to mention this method anyway. It is SciHub, which is a pirated PDF website. Personally, I never have used it. Whether you want to use it or not, I’m going to leave up to you. You might not get in trouble, but you might get in trouble for violating copyright laws by downloading this pirated material. Before you decide, you’ll have to think, can I cite the paper just by reading the title and the abstract? Maybe that’s enough for you to go ahead and cite the paper.

Do you have any additional tips for getting a scientific article that is behind a paywall? Leave a comment below!