14 Websites to Download Research Paper for Free – 2024
14 Top Websites for Free, Open Access Research Paper Download
Collecting and reading relevant research articles to one’s research areas is important for PhD scholars. However, for any research scholar, downloading a research paper is one of the most difficult tasks. You must pay for access to high-quality research materials or subscribe to the journal or publication. In this article, ilovephd lists the top 14 websites to download free research papers, journals, books, datasets, patents, and conference proceedings downloads.
Free Research Paper Download Websites – 2024
Check the 14 best free websites to download and read research papers listed below:
1. Sci-Hub
Sci-Hub is a website link with over 64.5 million academic papers and articles available for direct download. It bypasses publisher paywalls by allowing access through educational institution proxies. To download papers Sci-Hub stores papers in its repository, this storage is called Library Genesis (LibGen) or Library Genesis Proxy 2024. It helps researchers to download free articles by simply using Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article.
Visit: Working Sci-Hub Proxy Links – 2024
2. Z-Library
The Z-Library clones Library Genesis, a shadow library project. Z-Library facilitates file sharing of scholarly journal articles, academic texts, and general-interest books (including some copyrighted materials). While most of its books come from Library Genesis, further expanding the collection, users can also directly upload content to the site. This user-contributed content helps to make literature even more widely available. Additionally, individuals can donate to the website’s repository, furthering their mission of free access.
Z-Library claims to have a massive collection, boasting more than 10,139,382 Books books and 84,837,646 Articles articles as of April 25, 2024. According to the project’s page for academic publications (at booksc.org), it aspires to be “the world’s largest e-book library” as well as “the world’s largest scientific papers repository.” Interestingly, Z-Library also describes itself as a donation-based non-profit organization.
Visit Z-Library – You can Download 70,000,000+ scientific articles for free
3. Library Genesis
The Library Genesis aggregator is a community aiming to collect and catalog item descriptions for the most scientific, scientific, and technical directions, as well as file metadata. In addition to the descriptions, the aggregator contains only links to third-party resources hosted by users. All information posted on the website is collected from publicly available public Internet resources and is intended solely for informational purposes.
Visit: libgen.li
4. Unpaywall – Free Research Paper Download
Unpaywall harvests Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and makes it easy to find, track, and use. It is integrated into thousands of library systems, search platforms, and other information products worldwide. If you’re involved in scholarly communication, there’s a good chance you’ve already used Unpaywall data.
Unpaywall is run by OurResearch, a nonprofit dedicated to making scholarships more accessible to everyone. Open is our passion. So it’s only natural our source code is open, too.
Visit: unpaywall.org
5. GetTheResearch.org
GetTheResearch.org is an Artificial Intelligence(AI) powered search engine for searching and understanding scientific articles for researchers and scientists. It was developed as a part of the Unpaywall project. Unpaywall is a database of 23,329,737 free scholarly Open Access(OA) articles from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use.
Visit: Find and Understand 25 Million Peer-Reviewed Research Papers for Free
6. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 with 300 open-access journals. Today, this independent index contains almost 17,500 peer-reviewed, open-access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Open-access journals from all countries and in all languages are accepted for indexing.
DOAJ is financially supported by many libraries, publishers, and other like-minded organizations. Supporting DOAJ demonstrates a firm commitment to open access and the infrastructure that supports it.
Visit: doaj.org
7. Researcher
The Researcher is a free journal-finding mobile application that helps you to read new journal papers every day that are relevant to your research. It is the most popular mobile application used by more than 3 million scientists and researchers to keep themselves updated with the latest academic literature.
Visit: 10 Best Apps for Graduate Students
8. Science Open
ScienceOpen is a discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it. It provides context-building services for publishers, to bring researchers closer to the content than ever before. These advanced search and discovery functions, combined with post-publication peer review, recommendation, social sharing, and collection-building features make ScienceOpen the only research platform you’ll ever need.
Visit: scienceopen.com
9. OA.mg
OA.mg is a search engine for academic papers. Whether you are looking for a specific paper, or for research from a field, or all of an author’s works – OA.mg is the place to find it.
Visit: oa.mg
10. Internet Archive Scholar
Internet Archive Scholar (IAS) is a full-text search index that includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth-century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
Visit: Sci hub Alternative – Internet Archive Scholar
11. Citationsy Archives
Citationsy was founded in 2017 after the reference manager Cenk was using at the time, RefMe, was shut down. It was immediately obvious that the reason people loved RefMe — a clean interface, speed, no ads, and simplicity of use — did not apply to CiteThisForMe. It turned out to be easier than anticipated to get a rough prototype up.
Visit: citationsy.com
12. CORE
CORE is the world’s largest aggregator of open-access research papers from repositories and journals. It is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open-access mission. We serve the global network of repositories and journals by increasing the discoverability and reuse of open-access content.
It provides solutions for content management, discovery, and scalable machine access to research. Our services support a wide range of stakeholders, specifically researchers, the general public, academic institutions, developers, funders, and companies from a diverse range of sectors including but not limited to innovators, AI technology companies, digital library solutions, and pharma.
Visit: core.ac.uk
13. Dimensions
The database called “Dimensions” covers millions of research publications connected by more than 1.6 billion citations, supporting grants, datasets, clinical trials, patents, and policy documents.
Dimensions is the most comprehensive research grants database that links grants to millions of resulting publications, clinical trials, and patents. It
provides up-to-the-minute online attention data via Altmetric, showing you how often publications and clinical trials are discussed around the world. 226m Altmetric mentions with 17m links to publications.
Dimensions include datasets from repositories such as Figshare, Dryad, Zenodo, Pangaea, and many more. It hosts millions of patents with links to other citing patents as well as to publications and supporting grants.
Visit: dimensions.ai
14. PaperPanda – Download Research Papers for Free
PaperPanda is a Chrome extension that uses some clever logic and the Panda’s detective skills to find you the research paper PDFs you need. Essentially, when you activate PaperPanda it finds the DOI of the paper from the current page, and then goes and searches for it. It starts by querying various Open Access repositories like OpenAccessButton, OaDoi, SemanticScholar, Core, ArXiV, and the Internet Archive. You can also set your university library’s domain in the settings (this feature is in the works and coming soon). PaperPanda will then automatically search for the paper through your library. You can also set a different custom domain in the settings.
Visit: PaperPanda
I hope this article will help you to know some of the best websites to download research papers and journals for free. By utilizing open-access databases, free search tools, and potentially even your local university library, you can access a wealth of valuable scholarly information without infringing on a copyright. Remember, ethical practices in research paper downloading are important, so always prioritize legal access to materials whenever possible. Happy researching!