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Research ​

As a UBC student, you already have access to a lot of research resources through the UBC Library.

However sometimes you may not be able to find what you are looking for, or you may not be able to access your resources from home. This page will help you find what you need.

🔍 Finding Research Papers ​

  • Unpaywall: An open database of free scholarly articles, run by a non-profit organization. You can install a browser extension to see if a paper is available for free.
  • Sci-Hub: The most commonly recommended place for finding full research papers. You can paste in a DOI or URL to get the paper.

📚 Organizing your research ​

As you work on papers and projects in university, you'll find that it's much harder to manually keep track of all your sources. We HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you use a reference manager to help you organize your research. They can keep track of your sources, automatically generate citations, and help you collaborate with others.

If you need a particular citation style or need to manage in-text citations, you'll save a lot of time and stress by having a reference manager do it for you.

Reference Managers:

  • Zotero 🟢FREE 🌐OpenSource

    • Commonly recommended. Available on most platforms, it has a browser extension to help you save sources, and it has integrations for Google Docs and Microsoft Word.
    • Being open source means that it is free to use and that there aren't privacy concerns.

  • Mendeley 🟢FREE

    • Also commonly used with many great features. However it was purchased by Elsevier a few years ago and there have been complaints about changes that the new owners have made. Elsevier is a large academic publisher that has long been criticized for its business practices, which doesn't help Mendeley's reputation.

💬 Keeping up with research on campus ​