At every point of a student’s tertiary education journey, there is a need to carry out academic research. Either to find a solution to their time-limited assignments, write an essay, research their final year thesis, or even do casual reading. However, a major challenge faced by many students isn’t just what to search for, but how to see good websites to get academic journal, and most importantly, where to search for it for free.
Have you ever searched a keyword and after clicking the first link on the search result, you were required to pay a certain amount or log in through your institution before you can access it? As someone who has been in a similar situation countless times, I know how frustrating this can be, especially if your institution isn’t subscribed to the journal.
In truth, most online academic journals require their users to pay a certain amount before they can access their resources. Alternatively, students whose institutions already subscribe to the journal can login through their institution to access it for free. Nevertheless, I’m here to give you a list of the top 5 websites to get academic journals for free regardless of your course of study or the topic you’re researching. Let’s take a look at the list in no particular order;
Table of Contents
Top 5 Websites to Get Academic Journals for All Subjects
ResearchGate
ResearchGate is one of the most popular social networking platforms for researchers and scholars. In 2020, ResearchGate was estimated to have over 17 million active users across the world. This number has increased to 25 million as at September 2023.
Traffic: 25 million active users
Resources: Over 160 million publication
Fields of Study: All fields of study
Citation Available: Yes
DOI Available: Yes
Access Options: Free access to all resources and you can sign in through your institution/company with a paid option.
Mobile App Available: Yes
Additional Benefits: Users can request full resources from the authors if they are not available at the moment.
Negative Aspects: Too many unnecessary emails requesting you to confirm if the author(s) of a particular journal is correct or asking you to co-author a journal.
ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect provides access to millions of academic articles published by the Dutch publisher, Elsevier. The website ranked number one on WAVE WebAIM for accessibility, provides a user-friendly interface that allows you to search both journals and books across a range of topics and subjects.
Traffic: Over 15 million active users
Resources: 8 million journals and books published by Elsevier
Fields of Study: 24 disciplines
Citation Available: Yes
DOI Available: Yes
Access Options: Free access when you sign in through your institution/company
Mobile App Available: No
Additional Benefits: ScienceDirect has millions of books, thousands of peer-reviewed journals, and hundreds of open-access journals to browse from
Negative Aspects: You may be required to purchase access to some resources if they are not available for free or through your institution. Also, there are lots of unsolicited emails requesting you to confirm if the author(s) of a particular journal is correct or asking you to co-author a journal.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is an advanced search engine that compiles academic papers and research journals from a variety of sources, including journals, conference proceedings, and theses. It offers access to a large collection of academic literature, including management-related studies.
Traffic: 4.3 million daily visitors
Resources:160 million documents
Fields of Study: All fields of study
Citation Available: No
DOI Available: No
Access Options: Redirects you to an external journal
Mobile App Available: No
Additional Benefits: Google Scholar is a search engine for researching academic articles. It allows you to research journals from a wide range of websites and publications
Negative Aspects: There’s no guarantee of free access to the search results. Since it is a search engine, journals with higher search scores are displayed first and may not be free.
CORE
CORE is a transdisciplinary collector of open-access research. The journal contains the greatest collection of open-access articles collected from 11,000 data providers worldwide. Unlike the other journals discussed above, CORE indexes research papers from data providers including institutional and subject repositories, preprint servers, and open-access and hybrid journals. Although the majority of the search results contain the link to the full-text article on the original publisher’s website or to a downloadable PDF, more than five million entries are hosted directly on CORE.
Traffic: 20 million monthly active users
Resources: 345million open-access resources
Fields of Study: All fields of study
Citation Available: Yes
DOI Available: Yes
Access Options: Free
Mobile App Available: No
Additional Benefits: Core has a wide range of resources as they obtain journals from different sources across the world. And what’s more? All their journals are open-access.
JSTOR
Last on this list is JSTOR. JSTOR is one of the best online academic research tools with about 12 million journal articles in over 75 disciplines. It contains research articles focused mainly on humanities and social sciences. However, JSTOR is not an open-access database. This means you’ll have to check in through your university library, which usually provides off-campus access.
Traffic: 72 million users annually
Resources: Over 12 million resources
Fields of Study: Supports 75 disciplines
Citation Available: Yes
DOI Available:No
Access Options: Free when signed in through your institution
Mobile App Available: No
Additional Benefits: JSTOR has a ton of online resources available in both written journals and picture format.
Negative Aspects: Free access is through your institution’s subscription. If your institution isn’t subscribed to JSTOR, you might experience difficulties sourcing academic materials on the website.
Final Thoughts on 5 Websites to Get Academic Journals
There is no general rule followed in deciding the top websites to get academic resources. However, the 5 on this list were picked based on the variety of resources available and their accessibility. These platforms are essential resources for any researcher or manager trying to keep on top of their industry. By utilizing the power of these websites, you may have access to a tremendous amount of knowledge and insights that would otherwise be concealed, allowing you to make better-informed decisions and promote innovation inside your organization.
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