Doing academic research can be a pain-in-the-butt, especially if you don’t teach at a four-year institution that has lots of institutional access to it.

But there are tools out there that make it easier, and I’ve written about several of them.

I thought it would be useful to bring them all-together in one post. Let me know if I’m missing anything:

Author Path is a free tool to help university students write theses or journal articles. I had my daughter check it out (she just completed her Masters Thesis), and she says it would have been very helpful to her.

“Google Scholar” Alerts Could Be Very Helpful For Research

The Best Commentaries On Sci-Hub, The Tool Providing Access to 50 Million Academic Papers For Free

Sci-Hub Loses Domain Names, But Remains Resilient

“Unpaywall” Is New Tool For Accessing Research Papers For Free

“Iris.ia” Seems Like A Very Useful Research Tool

New Tool for Open-Access Research is from Inside Higher Ed.

The Real Cost of Knowledge:The University of California has broken with one of the world’s largest academic publishers. Is this the end of a very profitable business model? is from The Atlantic.

Frase lets you find, and then summarizes for you, research. It seems to me like a super-charged “Explore” button that you found on the bottom of Google Docs.

IF YOU WANT TO DO ANY RESEARCH, NOW IS THE TIME TO DO IT – JSTOR MAKES PAPERS AVAILABLE WITHOUT LOGIN

“CONNECTED PAPERS” IS AN EXCELLENT NEW TOOL FOR DOING ACADEMIC RESEARCH

JSTOR Provides Free Access Up To 100 Articles Each Month Through December

Figshare “is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.”

Scholarlys lets you create a feed for new research papers on topics you’re interested in – it’s sort of a Google Alerts for papers, but in a scrolling feed form.

How to Find, Read, and Use Academic Research is from Cult of Pedagogy.

LitMaps looks like an interesting way to do academic research.

Recall looks like a potentially very useful tool for research.

White House Orders Journals to Drop Paywalls on Publicly Funded Research is from The NY Times.

I also just learned about OA.mg. It has tons of freely available, and useful, academic papers, as does CORE.

Consensus is a new online tool that uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze your research question and explore 200 million peer-reviewed articles to find the answer. It’s in beta and, when I tried it, the answers did seem a bit better than what I would find using Google.

“SciSpace” Uses AI To Analyze Research Papers

18 Google Scholar tips all students should know is from Google.

Elicit uses AI to help make research easier.

Summarize Paper uses AI to summarize research papers from Arxiv.

Explain Paper will…explain academic papers to you in plain language.

CHATGPT AND BEYOND: THE BEST ONLINE RESOURCES FOR EVALUATING RESEARCH CLAIMS is from Learning and the Brain.

Research Rabbit uses AI to organize… research.

This is from Recomendo:

Like the previously recommended SciHub, Libgen (Library Genesis) is a shadow library offering free scientific papers online. But in addition to journal articles, this Russian-based site also offers magazine articles, books, and especially full textbooks often required for school. I use it to find scientific papers. Scientific and academic information is often very hard to get, especially in the developing world, so Libgen is extremely valuable everywhere, despite the fact that US-based publishers consider it a pirate site they are trying to take down.