Academic paper repositories.

February 25, 2006 11:45 AM

For physics papers, all the recent research is put onto http://www.arxiv.org/ Are there equivalent repositories for other disciplines, especially the social sciences?
posted by apathy0o0 to Education (19 answers total)

From what I understand, arXiv.org is a special thing. However, I'm surprised by how many academics haven't seen scholar.google.com.
posted by Eamon at 12:07 PM on February 25, 2006

Math and Computer Science also use the arXiv. I just the other day ran across this preprint archive for philosophy of science.
posted by gleuschk at 12:13 PM on February 25, 2006

I'm not sure about exactly equivalent resources, but RePec is a big bibliographic database for economics. Sites like ingentaconnect.com and blackwellsynergy.com often carry most of the latest research, but it's rarely free (depends on the institution you're logging in from, though).

The site I use the most is JStor which is an excellent archive of journals. It provides free-at-the-point-of-use fulltext journals. The catch is that it's consistently (and deliberately) 2 or 3 years behind the most recent issue. It focuses on social sciences, but also covers a range of other subjects.
posted by matthewr at 12:14 PM on February 25, 2006

Citeseer contains a lot of of computer science papers.
posted by rpn at 12:22 PM on February 25, 2006

NIH now requests that any manuscripts that emerged from their funding to be submitted to an archive. But the catch is that the preprints aren't released until the articles are actually published. Here's the policy and the archive.
posted by epugachev at 12:32 PM on February 25, 2006

Political science: No.

The closest approximation is probably the polmeth archive, but that's limited to (1) stuff that's going to methodology conferences or panels and (2) other stuff by the sorts of people who give methods papers.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:33 PM on February 25, 2006

The IACR operates the Cryptology ePrint Archive, which functions much like arXiv, just targeted to the field of cryptology.
posted by RichardP at 1:49 PM on February 25, 2006

I second Jstor.

Also, I tend to use Google Scholar and then go through my school's databases to access journal articles that come up.
posted by anjamu at 3:36 PM on February 25, 2006

Social Science Research Network
posted by milkrate at 3:40 PM on February 25, 2006

jstor isn't the same thing as arxiv, as I understand it. jstor is just published journals, arxiv is stuff that hasn't been published in a book or journal yet.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:22 PM on February 25, 2006

For math, I recommend the Front end to the arXiv.

It's completely counterintuitive that the computer scientists don't use preprint archives. Rather, they stick their papers on their web pages and let Citeseer discover them. Then if the web page comes down, oops! paper's gone.

Some of the bigger science journals (Science and Nature, I think) are really uptight about their authors using preprint servers. And then they charge per page to publish there! A fine reason to starve them of submissions, I would suggest.
posted by Aknaton at 5:19 PM on February 25, 2006

I posted this to the front page the other day. These repositories store papers (post-prints, theses, datasets, etc.) in virtually all disciplines.
posted by cog_nate at 5:43 PM on February 25, 2006

PsycINFO is the psychology equivilent. Very useful and comprehensive. $500+ for a year's worth of individual access, though.
posted by charmston at 6:18 PM on February 25, 2006

(Aside to Aknaton: the arXiv has redesigned in the last few months, and is both prettier and marginally more useful than it used to be. The distinction between it and the Front is not so striking as it once was. There are some clueful people working for them now, and they're working on it; e.g., it finally has a functioning search. And they now support trackbacks if you're the right sort of person and know the right sort of people.)
posted by gleuschk at 8:19 PM on February 25, 2006

ACM is fairly complete for computer science/etc.
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:58 PM on February 25, 2006

Aknaton: Some of the bigger science journals (Science and Nature, I think) are really uptight about their authors using preprint servers.

Don't know about Science but Nature actually had an editorial about this sometime last year, saying that it was only a rumor that they don't allow the use of preprint servers. It was kind of funny because they sounded really annoyed--like "dammit, we never said that!"

A fine reason to starve them of submissions, I would suggest.

Better reasons to starve them of submissions:
1. Flashy science is obnoxious (buzzwords, etc.)
2. High-impact publishing is a component of the scientific celebrity machine, and that machine may increase the incidence of fraud (see the recent Hwang stem cell scandal)
3. They severly limit the length of your articles, meaning that papers published in those journals are generally less useful than full length papers published elsewhere.

That said, if I ever produce anything worthy of S or N, I'll of course submit to them.

posted by epugachev at 12:36 AM on February 26, 2006

I wish there was an open archive for chemistry and/or environemental sciences, but the American Chemical Society has a hammerlock on all of the publishing. Perhaps more importantly, they also run the standard index for the field: Chemical Abstracts. Until a real alternative for CAS numbers appears, the ACS will continue to be the Dark Overlord or chemical publishing.
posted by bonehead at 8:29 AM on February 26, 2006

This is a bit late and a probably a bit too domain-specific, but there is a fanstastic and frequently updated repository of papers in natural language semantics at semanticsarchive.net. I've often wished there similar services for other fields.
posted by miagaille at 7:49 AM on February 27, 2006

By the way, some of the linked sites (for example, JStor and ACM) are not accessible without some sort of subscription. If you're at a subscribing academic institution, access may be transparent for you, but it isn't for the rest of us....
posted by klausness at 12:24 AM on March 1, 2006