Ask HN: How do non-academic people find related papers to an specific topic?

9 points by Francute 6 years ago | 6 comments

Let's say i'm interested in a topic that I can't find formal discussions through Google. How do I find related papers to my topic?

kratom_sandwich 6 years ago |

I don't think that the research process is different for academics and non-academics since most databases are publicly available (although the actual papers might be not).

If you have already found a paper on your topic, locate that paper in a field-specific database (e.g. RePEc for economics, IEEE for computer science, the Web of Science for a more general database, PubMed for medicine, ...) and look at cited and citing articles which are relevant. Also, search for other publications by the same author.

If you don't have a paper on the topic: I believe that some databases offer a list of keywords, so you might wanna look at that list and see if anything relevant pops up.

gus_massa 6 years ago |

You are probably using the wrong keyword. One trick is to select the article that is closer to the topic you want, and try to pick a few keyword from that article. And then iterate this. Sometimes it converges to the right location.

(What topic? Perhaps we can help.)

yesenadam 6 years ago |

Apart from Google scholar, search in Library Genesis scientific papers search. Once you have a result, can click on journal title to check out everything in each issue.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/

I think it's same database as SciHub, but LibGen has keyword/author search, don't need exact paper title. So useful!! Only gives the first 100 results though..

byoung2 6 years ago |

You can do advanced Google searches:

healthcare disparities among transgender patients "doi" after:2015:09-01

When you find an interesting article, use the doi number (e.g. 10.1371/journal.pone.0156210) here to get the full article:

http://sci-hub.tw/

muzani 6 years ago |

I normally look for books that summarize the topic, skim them, then search references for the paper detailing it.

PaulHoule 6 years ago |

I search on PubMed for biomedical topics.