Finding a specific publication

Search engines

  • Google Scholar: A freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
  • Semantic Scholar: An AI-powered research tool for scientific literature that uses natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

Full texts & preprints

  • Arxiv: A free distribution service and an open-access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
  • HAL: An open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields. While it is primarily directed towards French academics, participation is not restricted to them.
  • PubMed: A free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics.
  • SSRN: A repository for preprints devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, and health sciences, among others.
  • PapersWithCode: Highlights trending Machine Learning research and the code to implement it.
  • Ar5iv: Articles from arXiv.org as responsive HTML5 web pages.
  • ResearchGate: A European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.
  • Unpaywall: A browser plugin to harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories.

The restricted section

The following websites contain millions of full-text articles and books, gathered with sometimes dubious methods. Due to frequent conflicts with law enforcement, they often change their URL, which is why I link to their Wikipedia page instead. Of course, I cannot officially recommend them, but if you want to use them, I cannot stop you!

  • SciHub: A shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, without regard to copyright, by bypassing publishers’ paywalls in various ways. It does not provide access to books.
  • LibGen: A file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines.
  • Z-Library: A shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts and general-interest books. It began as a mirror of Library Genesis, from which most of its books originate.

Exploring the literature

Review helpers

  • ResearchRabbit: A novel way to search for papers and authors, monitor new literature, visualize research landscapes, and collaborate with colleagues.
  • Elicit: Uses language models to help you automate research workflows, like parts of literature review.
  • ConnectedPapers: Explore connected papers in a visual graph where papers are arranged according to their similarity.
  • VosViewer: A software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks.
  • Scite.ai: A platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations: this allow users to see how a publication has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim.
  • arXiv Xplorer: A semantic search engine for ArXiv based on language models.

Keeping up-to-date

  • Google Scholar alerts: Get emails periodically with newly published papers that match your search criteria.
  • Feedly: A news aggregator application, compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others.

Storing sources

Papers

  • Zotero: A free and open-source reference management software to manage bibliographic data and related research materials, such as PDF files.
  • EndNote: A commercial reference management software package, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays, reports and articles.
  • Mendeley: A reference manager software used to manage and share research papers and generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.

Other formats

  • Tropy: A free and open-source desktop knowledge organization application that helps users manage and describe photographs of research materials.

Creating bibliographies

  • ZoteroBib: Build a bibliography instantly from paper titles or URLs.
  • AnyStyle: Parse a list of citations in any style to build a bibliography.
  • Recite: Checks that your in text citations match the reference list at the end of your work.

Online courses

  • Coursera: A U.S.-based massive open online course provider working with universities and other organizations to offer online courses, certifications, and degrees in a variety of subjects.
  • OpenClassrooms: A France-based online education platform for vocational training, providing courses in IT, technology, entrepreneurship, and digital skills.
  • FunMOOC: Federate online course projects from French universities and schools to give them international visibility.