FALLIBLE FOX

Source Material Part 2: Accessing the Author's Sources 

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When the sources in a piece are academic/scientific, the answer to whether a member of the general public 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 (i.e., there is generally no reason for you to ever pay for academic articles!).

 

Academic works are, however, quite 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. Sometimes, too, journals are open-access, which means that they provide free and unrestricted access to their articles. 

 

If you're reading a popular press article and hoping to get direct access via links or references to the full journal articles, you may or may not 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 title, authors, and abstract (i.e., the summary of the methods, findings, and conclusions). 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—you might find the full article associated with a different version. 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.

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For post-secondary (college and university students), the above may work just fine, but you'll also have access to journal articles through your school's library. This is a good go-to as well. 

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Finally, if you still can't get the article, it's always possible to reach out to the author! Nothing wrong with bothering an academic so you can check out their work. Look up their email at their personal or university website, and ask for the article you're interested in. Generally, try the first listed author—they're usually, but not always, the lead on the project. It's entirely reasonable for them to respond by sharing a file containing the full article (that's not to say that all academics are reasonable, but it can't hurt to try!). 

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 next 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.