Literature Review

Where to gather data and learn new concepts for your research: a more or less comprehensive guide

I'll try to not spend your time, let's get to business right away. The first step of any research project is literature review. You need to know what you are doing and what has already been done. There are a few ways to do it: published papers, books, theses. This article in not concerned with the way data is processed, only with sources.

Disclaimer: this article doesn't endorse violating law and is purely hypothetical. Please abide by the rules and the social contract (courtesy of John Locke).

Papers

Peer-reviewed papers are published in journals and avaliable if you or your university (if you happen to be a student) have a subscription. Which is expensive. Very expensive. There are a few ways to get them for free, more or less legal. Everyone uses them so don't be shy, but having proxy or better yet Tor configured is handy in case your government blocked these sites.

Sci-hub

Powerful database that bypasses paywalls, most of the articles are here, unless it's very new and not popular (small articles are hard to come by if they are less than the year old).

Pros:

- quick

- convenient

- search by DOI

- humongous database

- instant PDF download

Cons:

- illegal

- most countries block it (can be bypassed)

How to use: type "whereisscihubnow" in your search engine of choice, proceed to the page that lists avaliable mirrors and domains, find one that works for you. Dont bother bookmarking it as they change quite often. Proceed to the site, paste DOI, view or download PDF. Done, you are wonderful. There is also a telegram bot if you happen to use this messenger.

oaDOI

DOI stands for "digital object identifier", this is a code that every published article has. It's unique and used for, well, identifying objects. DOI is usually provided as a link to doi.org/blablabla. oaDOI stands for "open access DOI" and basically searches for an open access version of an article.

How to use: replace doi to oadoi in the link, paste into your browser. If it sends you to a paywalled page than there is no open-access version.

Pros:

- quick

- pretty legal

- search by DOI

Cons:

- smaller database

- no badass logo included

Researchgate

A site that provides a lot of open souce articles and allows you to request an article from the author directly.

Pros:

- might work where the other two failed

- gets you in contact with people

- there is a forum

Cons: 

- not everyone uses it

- may take a long time

Books

Libgen

For the most part I use libgen, which is as illegal as sci-hub and mostly blocked, but searching for "libgen mirrors" or using Tor usually works. Just open the site and type book's title, author or ISBN.

Pros:

- big database, actually uses a few sources to search

- both scientific books and fiction are avaliable

- multiple formats

- multiple mirrors and magnet links for download

- search by ISBN

Cons:

- illegal, blocked

- search engine is quite simplistic, it won't correct typos, etc., so be careful

Torrents

There are a lot of them, really. Find a tracker that works for you. I rarely use these for scientific research since 99% of what you need can be found is the resources listed above, of which 90% are avaliable on sci-hub.

Conclusion

I always thought these were obvious but it turns out some freshmen don't know about sci-hub and few people know libgen. I hope this helps.