How to Search and Download Research Papers, Journals and Scientific Articles from Google Scholar for Free

You might be very familiar with using Google Scholar to find research papers, journals or scientific articles, but sometimes many of the articles are not freely accessible. This article explains how to access those seemingly not accessible research paper, journals or scientific articles for free.  If you are not really familiar with using Google scholar this article will also introduce the basics as well. Here are the steps to help you get started.

Step 1: Navigate to the URL https://scholar.google.com/

Step 2: Type the sentence or keyword you want to find research papers, journals or scientific articles.

Note that it is important to keep your source of information as recent as possible. As a rule of thumb, 90% of your journal or research paper should be within 5 years; follow step 3 to narrow down the years. Select the year you want. It is better to keep the result as recent as possible so you can start by narrowing down your search to 2020 by pressing ‘Since 2020’ as shown below:

if you don’t find enough research papers, journals or scientific articles to use, then you can select ‘Since 2019’ for 1-year-old journals or ‘Since 2016’ for 5-years-old journals as seen below:

However, if you want research papers, journals or scientific articles that are older than 5 years as well then select ‘Any time’ as shown below:

Step 4: Right-click and open the links for the research papers, journals or scientific articles that have direct access PDF or Word document as seen in the screenshot below:

Steps 5: For the journals that do not have links as seen in the screenshot below, copy the name or the URL or the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and search it in the Sci-Hub website. 99% of the time you will find these research papers, journals or scientific articles in PDF format; Sci-Hub has millions of free journals and research papers and you will most likely find what you need here. The website is legal even though it has been sued several times by companies like Elsevier. Sci-Hub works by taking institutional login credentials donated from students, researchers, and other academics to access the research papers, journals or scientific articles you are looking for and then download a copy of it to store it on their own server.

For example, the full access for the journal ‘A Maturity model for hospital information systems’ is not available through Google scholar, therefore we can search for the name of the journal on the sci.hub.tw website as shown below:

https://sci.hubg.org/

You can click on open to access the journal. You can also download the journal by clicking on the right top download icon as shown below:

Final Thoughts

That’s it, I hope you found this very easy if you have any problem with any of the steps stated above, feel free to drop a comment and I will try as much as possible to reply. Thanks for reading and enjoy your research.

See Also:  Are Paraphrasing Tools Really Worth It? | A Quick Guide To IEEE Referencing In Microsoft Word | How to Paraphrase | A Quick and Complete Guide to Harvard Referencing