When your teacher, lecturer, and internal common sense tell you that
there's a lot of misinformed hogwash and misinformation online, it's not
all bad news! You can find scholarly articles online with peer review
and referencing up to your eyeballs. The utility and reliability of the
articles is till up to your critical mind but here is how to go about
finding them. This article also tries to highlight where you're more
likely to get free access but there may be times when payment is
required.
1) Turn to Google Scholar. To begin with, this is a good place to search for scholarly works. It can be found at:
http://scholar.google.com.
It may have your own country's URL ending though, so you can also
simply google "Google Scholar" for the local return. This search
mechanism provides you with the opportunity to search across numerous
disciplines and sources. It searches journals, theses, abstracts,
articles, etc.
- Simple keyword searches may not be as beneficial in terms of returns
as in the normal Google search engine. Try using the advanced search
options to search for phrases, titles, authors, etc.
- The returns in the search will be a list of citations in order of
relevance (rather than chronologically as you usually get with academic
article searches). When you click on one, it will give you publication
information, such as the name of the journal, date of publication and
the publisher. If you click on the article title, you'll get more
information and possibly be taken to an abstract or the full text
(meaning you can access the article free-of-charge). If the full text
does not appear, you will usually get linked straight to the publisher's
page or a public database if there is one.
2) search in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed "Pubmed" search.
3) Search in Sciencedirect
try in http://www.sciencedirect.com/
4) Look at the individual websites of well known journal publishers.
These will contain a lot of abstracts that can be downloaded with
payment, although sometimes they are free of charge as well. Some
journal publishers provide periods of time when articles are available
for free in particular disciplines such as the social sciences. However,
this option is likely to require payment for much of the access unless
you are a student or employee of an educational institution or employee
of a firm/corporation that subscribes to the relevant journals.
5)
Visit the DOAJ. This is the Directory of Open Access Journals and it is found at:
http://www.doaj.org/.
As its name suggests, it is free of charge and here you can search for
quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in a wide range of
fields and languages.
6)
Check out professional articles that have been produced by professional firms and professional societies.
In the areas of law, medicine, engineering, psychology, and other
professions, you can often find reputable articles offering guidance
from top people in their professions. Partly marketing, partly ongoing
information for continued learning for professionals, these are often
freely available to anyone interested in checking them out.
7)
Check out universities. A number of universities are
taking a very open approach to providing scholarly articles to the
general public, which is an excellent initiative because the more people
who have correct facts in this world, the better. You'll need to hunt
around to find which universities have a more open policy on providing
access to articles online.
Tips:
- If you find that an article you want requires payment, don't give up
just yet. Try your local library's electronic access first to see if
they subscribe to the relevant journal or to see if they can order it in
for you. And if you know someone studying at university or working in a
professional capacity, you might be able to ask them to kindly look up
an article for you if they have access to a particular journal.
- Search for "gateways" to free journals online.
source : http://www.wikihow.com/Find-Scholarly-Articles-Online
