4 ms·
At the times in the past when I haven't had institutional access, it has only rarely been a problem: the vast majority of the papers I want to read are freely-a
by neilc 17y ago
At the times in the past when I haven't had institutional access, it has only rarely been a problem: the vast majority of the papers I want to read are freely-available online (CiteSeer, Google Scholar, DBLP, etc.). For the rare occasions when I couldn't find a free copy of a paper, I would just ask a friend of mine with ACM/IEEE/etc. access to get me a copy. The ACM/IEEE web archives are a major annoyance in theory, but I wasn't too inconvenienced in practice.
- gruseom 17y agoWould you please spell it out for me, assuming that I am a complete novice? How exactly do you get copies of actual papers from "CiteSeer, Google Scholar, DBLP, etc."? It may occur to you that if I'm too dumb to find papers I'm probably too dumb to read them. Please ignore this :) I'm sure that a dumbed-down answer would include some helpful tips for those of us who don't do this every day but have a need to dive into the literature from time to time (and would probably benefit from doing it more often).
- neilc 17y agoWell, pretty simple: Google for the title of the paper. Some of the hits you'll get will be behind paywalls (like the ACM DL), but there are usually just PDFs you can freely download. Similarly with using Google Scholar and CiteSeer, which often keeps cached copies of the PDFs it finds online. Failing that, check the websites of the authors of the paper.
- gruseom 17y agoOk, I get it. That's pretty much what I've been doing, but at least this thread clued me in to the fact that one can sometimes find pdfs on Citeseer. Thanks.