FALLIBLE FOX

Accessing the Author's Sources (Source Material Part 3)

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When the sources in a piece are academic/scientific, the answer to whether you can gain access to those sources has traditionally been no—many academic sources are not easily accessible to the general public. Scholarly journals often have a paywall blocking free access. The exception is if you have college or university affiliation—in this case you are more likely to have free access to journal articles via your institution's library. No one in their right mind would ever pay the exorbitant fees assigned to many academic articles in peer-reviewed journals.

 

Academic works are, however, a bit more accessible today than they used to be. You can often get free access to journal articles via searches like Google Scholar. This is the case for various reasons; for example, many scientists put their articles up on their personal websites despite copyright.

 

If you're hoping to get direct access to the full journal articles via links in popular press sources you're reading, you may be out of luck. Popular press sources will often link only to the official site for academic sources, where you'll find the paywall. You'll find some useful information there, however, including the abstract (i.e., the summary of the methods and findings). However, if you want the full article for free, try doing a little detective work. Here's your first go-to option:

 

• Copy some of the unique info about the source from the publisher's site—often just the title of the source will do—and paste it into Google Scholar.

• If you look to the far right of the search results, you will often see a link labelled with "[PDF]" or "[HTML]".

• Click that link and you should have access to the full text of the original journal article. You won't always be successful, but it's worth a try.

 

The other key trick to note is that right below the search result in Google Scholar, you'll see how many other sources cited this work, related articles, and how many versions of this source were picked up by the google search. If you click on the versions link, each one will appear to you in a new search results page. This trick is important if the initial result that came up did not have a "[PDF]" link or a link to another type of accessible document. Play around with Google Scholar. It's particularly useful for research when you're writing a paper. Often a little detective work can get you what you're trying to find.

If you absolutely can't find the full academic source for free, you can still get quite a bit of information about it from the publisher's website (again, this is often the site that's linked from the popular press piece or blog post you've read). Generally, this will include the title, authors, journal where it's published, and a short summary (i.e., an abstract) with a little more info about the research. From this information, you can do some digging into the authors' expertise, the quality of the journal, and the basics about the type of scholarship conducted in the original work.