How To Download Paid Journal Articles / Research Papers for FREE

Good Day Y'all. 

Today I will be discussing a very important topic. The outcome of a good research work depends on it. I will be explaining how to source and download paid journal articles/research work for free.  Often times while surfing the Internet for research materials, we come across some very good research works we would love to use in our own work.  We may desire to cite the publication, reference it, include it in our discussions of the literature review of our research, or even adopt or adapt the methodology used in that particular research work and replicate same in our research. etc. This is made easier when we have access to the full publication of the research work.

Unfortunately, most times, these publications are not open access but rather paid access.  This in essence means that one has to purchase the research articles/publications in other to have full access in reading the entire work. Mostly, we have access only to the abstract of the research work and this most often than not does not give us all the desired information from the research work.

I will give a guide on how to source for and download these paid access publications in Portable Document Format (PDF) for free. This will be most useful for those who are financially constrained. However, note that this is for educational purposes only and its use shouldn't be abused.

I realized 3^rd world countries and Africa in particular are lacking centuries behind in the world of research. Financial limitation and intellectual laziness are key factors in this regard. This informed my decision to create awareness about some way out for folks to try and bridge the huge intellectual gap between the developed and developing nations.

First and foremost, I want to clearly state that this write-up is targeted at people of the world who are financially disadvantaged. If you have the funds to buy these articles, please do so to support the Journal Publishers and Researchers. The Journal Publishers have contributed in no small measures to the world of research. I would also like to mention that there is a wealth of Open Access articles researchers can access and make use of. I may dedicate a post to these sites in the future. Stay hooked to this blog for more interesting stuffs. 
You can source for articles/literatures/publications /research works, both open Access and Paid Access from various databases such as:

1. Scopus
2. Sciencedirect
3. Web of Science
4. Google Scholar
5. Pubmed

1   After typing in the key words of your literature search into the search bar in any of these sites, you will be provided with numerous list of related research work based on your search query. 

Sci-hub

Click on any of the paid publications in the search results, and scroll down to see the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number or the ISBN, or page URL. Copy any of these. 

scihub pdf

article doi

1   Next is to visit any of the sites below in order of preference. The most powerful of them all is sci-hub.Sci-hub was created in 2011 by a 22 year old Neuroscientist graduate student from Kazakhstan, Alexandra Elbakyan. Sci-hub has gained worldwide popularity and patronage with a reported 28 million download requests within a 6 month period spanning from September 2015 to February 2016. Europe has the highest number of sci-hub users, followed by North America, South America, Asia, and Africa which has the least). Ironically, Sci-hub is mostly used on campuses in developed countries with the best journal access in USA and Europe. In Nigeria, Illorin had 1428 sci-hub users, Nsukka had just 4 while Lagos had 8503 users. It has several mirrors from which one can choose from whenever a particular one is down. Note however that it may be ILLEGAL.  There is currently a law suit filed by Elsevier against the founder. Its mirror sites include the following:

a.     Sci-hub.org

b.     Sci-hub.bz

c.     Sci-hub.io

d.     Sci-hub.cc

e.     Scihub22266oqcxt.onion

f.      31.184.194.81

2     Other alternative websites to sci-hub include:

        Http://libgen.io/scimag/

3      Http://booksc.org/

         Http://freefullpdf.com/

         Http://jxplore.com/

Within the search box of any of these websites, paste the copied DOI, ISBN or URL, and click on enter.

scihub

Automatically the full research work publication will be downloaded in PDF format. 

download pdf article

Sometimes you may have to fill in a captcha content before the download starts on sci-hub, but not to worry, it is just a walk in the park. You can now read the full document and make use of its content.

research article

HAPPY SURFING, DOWNLOADING AND RESEARCHING.

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