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21 Legit Research Databases for Free Journal Articles in 2022

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Written by  Scribendi

Has this ever happened to you? While looking for websites for research, you come across a research paper site that claims to connect academics to a peer-reviewed article database for free.

Intrigued, you search for keywords related to your topic, only to discover that you must pay a hefty subscription fee to access the service. After the umpteenth time being duped, you begin to wonder if there's even such a thing as free journal articles .

Subscription fees and paywalls are often the bane of students and academics, especially those at small institutions who don't provide access to many free article directories and repositories.

Whether you're working on an undergraduate paper, a PhD dissertation, or a medical research study, we want to help you find tools to locate and access the information you need to produce well-researched, compelling, and innovative work.

Below, we discuss why peer-reviewed articles are superior and list out the best free article databases to use in 2022.

Download Our Free Research Database Roundup PDF

Why peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are more authoritative.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Determining what sources are reliable can be challenging. Peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are the gold standard in academic research. Reputable academic journals have a rigorous peer-review process.

The peer review process provides accountability to the academic community, as well as to the content of the article. The peer review process involves qualified experts in a specific (often very specific) field performing a review of an article's methods and findings to determine things like quality and credibility.

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in peer-reviewed article databases and research databases, and if you know that a database of journals is reliable, that can offer reassurances about the reliability of a free article. Peer review is often double blind, meaning that the author removes all identifying information and, likewise, does not know the identity of the reviewers. This helps reviewers maintain objectivity and impartiality so as to judge an article based on its merit.

Where to Find Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in a variety of research databases. Below is a list of some of the major databases you can use to find peer-reviewed articles and other sources in disciplines spanning the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

What Are Open Access Journals?

An open access (OA) journal is a journal whose content can be accessed without payment. This provides scholars, students, and researchers with free journal articles . OA journals use alternate methods of funding to cover publication costs so that articles can be published without having to pass those publication costs on to the reader.

Open Access Journals

Some of these funding models include standard funding methods like advertising, public funding, and author payment models, where the author pays a fee in order to publish in the journal. There are OA journals that have non-peer-reviewed academic content, as well as journals that focus on dissertations, theses, and papers from conferences, but the main focus of OA is peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.

The internet has certainly made it easier to access research articles and other scholarly publications without needing access to a university library, and OA takes another step in that direction by removing financial barriers to academic content.

Choosing Wisely

Features of legitimate oa journals.

 There are things to look out for when trying to decide if a free publication journal is legitimate:

Mission statement —The mission statement for an OA journal should be available on their website.

Publication history —Is the journal well established? How long has it been available?

Editorial board —Who are the members of the editorial board, and what are their credentials?

Indexing —Can the journal be found in a reliable database?

Peer review —What is the peer review process? Does the journal allow enough time in the process for a reliable assessment of quality?

Impact factor —What is the average number of times the journal is cited over a two-year period?

Features of Illegitimate OA Journals

There are predatory publications that take advantage of the OA format, and they are something to be wary of. Here are some things to look out for:

Contact information —Is contact information provided? Can it be verified?

Turnaround —If the journal makes dubious claims about the amount of time from submission to publication, it is likely unreliable.

Editorial board —Much like determining legitimacy, looking at the editorial board and their credentials can help determine illegitimacy.

Indexing —Can the journal be found in any scholarly databases?

Peer review —Is there a statement about the peer review process? Does it fit what you know about peer review?

How to Find Scholarly Articles

Identify keywords.

Keywords are included in an article by the author. Keywords are an excellent way to find content relevant to your research topic or area of interest. In academic searches, much like you would on a search engine, you can use keywords to navigate through what is available to find exactly what you're looking for.

Authors provide keywords that will help you easily find their article when researching a related topic, often including general terms to accommodate broader searches, as well as some more specific terms for those with a narrower scope. Keywords can be used individually or in combination to refine your scholarly article search.

Narrow Down Results

Sometimes, search results can be overwhelming, and searching for free articles on a journal database is no exception, but there are multiple ways to narrow down your results. A good place to start is discipline.

What category does your topic fall into (psychology, architecture, machine learning, etc.)? You can also narrow down your search with a year range if you're looking for articles that are more recent.

A Boolean search can be incredibly helpful. This entails including terms like AND between two keywords in your search if you need both keywords to be in your results (or, if you are looking to exclude certain keywords, to exclude these words from the results).

Consider Different Avenues

If you're not having luck using keywords in your search for free articles, you may still be able to find what you're looking for by changing your tactics. Casting a wider net sometimes yields positive results, so it may be helpful to try searching by subject if keywords aren't getting you anywhere.

You can search for a specific publisher to see if they have OA publications in the academic journal database. And, if you know more precisely what you're looking for, you can search for the title of the article or the author's name.

The Top 21 Free Online Journal and Research Databases

Navigating OA journals, research article databases, and academic websites trying to find high-quality sources for your research can really make your head spin. What constitutes a reliable database? What is a useful resource for your discipline and research topic? How can you find and access full-text, peer-reviewed articles?

Fortunately, we're here to help. Having covered some of the ins and outs of peer review, OA journals, and how to search for articles, we have compiled a list of the top 21 free online journals and the best research databases. This list of databases is a great resource to help you navigate the wide world of academic research.

These databases provide a variety of free sources, from abstracts and citations to full-text, peer-reviewed OA journals. With databases covering specific areas of research and interdisciplinary databases that provide a variety of material, these are some of our favorite free databases, and they're totally legit!

CORE is a multidisciplinary aggregator of OA research. CORE has the largest collection of OA articles available. It allows users to search more than 219 million OA articles. While most of these link to the full-text article on the original publisher's site, or to a PDF available for download, five million records are hosted directly on CORE.

CORE's mission statement is a simple and straightforward commitment to offering OA articles to anyone, anywhere in the world. They also host communities that are available for researchers to join and an ambassador community to enhance their services globally. In addition to a straightforward keyword search, CORE offers advanced search options to filter results by publication type, year, language, journal, repository, and author.

CORE's user interface is easy to use and navigate. Search results can be sorted based on relevance or recency, and you can search for relevant content directly from the results screen.

Collection: 219,537,133 OA articles

Other Services: Additional services are available from CORE, with extras that are geared toward researchers, repositories, and businesses. There are tools for accessing raw data, including an API that provides direct access to data, datasets that are available for download, and FastSync for syncing data content from the CORE database.

CORE has a recommender plug-in that suggests relevant OA content in the database while conducting a search and a discovery feature that helps you discover OA versions of paywalled articles. Other features include tools for managing content, such as a dashboard for managing repository output and the Repository Edition service to enhance discoverability.

Good Source of Peer-Reviewed Articles: Yes

Advanced Search Options: Language, author, journal, publisher, repository, DOI, year

2. ScienceOpen

Functioning as a research and publishing network, ScienceOpen offers OA to more than 74 million articles in all areas of science. Although you do need to register to view the full text of articles, registration is free. The advanced search function is highly detailed, allowing you to find exactly the research you're looking for.

The Berlin- and Boston-based company was founded in 2013 to "facilitate open and public communications between academics and to allow ideas to be judged on their merit, regardless of where they come from." Search results can be exported for easy integration with reference management systems.

You can also bookmark articles for later research. There are extensive networking options, including your Science Open profile, a forum for interacting with other researchers, the ability to track your usage and citations, and an interactive bibliography. Users have the ability to review articles and provide their knowledge and insight within the community.

Collection: 74,560,631

Other Services: None

Advanced Search Options:  Content type, source, author, journal, discipline

3. Directory of Open Access Journals

A multidisciplinary, community-curated directory, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) gives researchers access to high-quality peer-reviewed journals. It has archived more than two million articles from 17,193 journals, allowing you to either browse by subject or search by keyword.

The site was launched in 2003 with the aim of increasing the visibility of OA scholarly journals online. Content on the site covers subjects from science, to law, to fine arts, and everything in between. DOAJ has a commitment to "increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, OA scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language."

Information about the journal is available with each search result. Abstracts are also available in a collapsible format directly from the search screen. The scholarly article website is somewhat simple, but it is easy to navigate. There are 16 principles of transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing that clearly outline DOAJ policies and standards.

Collection: 6,817,242

Advanced Search Options:  Subject, journal, year

4. Education Resources Information Center

The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) of the Institution of Education Sciences allows you to search by topic for material related to the field of education. Links lead to other sites, where you may have to purchase the information, but you can search for full-text articles only. You can also search only peer-reviewed sources.

The service primarily indexes journals, gray literature (such as technical reports, white papers, and government documents), and books. All sources of material on ERIC go through a formal review process prior to being indexed. ERIC's selection policy is available as a PDF on their website.

The ERIC website has an extensive FAQ section to address user questions. This includes categories like general questions, peer review, and ERIC content. There are also tips for advanced searches, as well as general guidance on the best way to search the database. ERIC is an excellent database for content specific to education.

Collection: 1,292,897

Advanced Search Options: Boolean

5. arXiv e-Print Archive

The arXiv e-Print Archive is run by Cornell University Library and curated by volunteer moderators, and it now offers OA to more than one million e-prints.

There are advisory committees for all eight subjects available on the database. With a stated commitment to an "emphasis on openness, collaboration, and scholarship," the arXiv e-Print Archive is an excellent STEM resource.

The interface is not as user-friendly as some of the other databases available, and the website hosts a blog to provide news and updates, but it is otherwise a straightforward math and science resource. There are simple and advanced search options, and, in addition to conducting searches for specific topics and articles, users can browse content by subject. The arXiv e-Print Archive clearly states that they do not peer review the e-prints in the database.

Collection: 1,983,891

Good Source of Peer-Reviewed Articles: No

Advanced Search Options:  Subject, date, title, author, abstract, DOI

6. Social Science Research Network

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a collection of papers from the social sciences community. It is a highly interdisciplinary platform used to search for scholarly articles related to 67 social science topics. SSRN has a variety of research networks for the various topics available through the free scholarly database.

The site offers more than 700,000 abstracts and more than 600,000 full-text papers. There is not yet a specific option to search for only full-text articles, but, because most of the papers on the site are free access, it's not often that you encounter a paywall. There is currently no option to search for only peer-reviewed articles.

You must become a member to use the services, but registration is free and enables you to interact with other scholars around the world. SSRN is "passionately committed to increasing inclusion, diversity and equity in scholarly research," and they encourage and discuss the use of inclusive language in scholarship whenever possible.

Collection: 1,058,739 abstracts; 915,452 articles

Advanced Search Options: Term, author, date, network

7. Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a big player in the world of OA science. Publishing 12 OA journals, the nonprofit organization is committed to facilitating openness in academic research. According to the site, "all PLOS content is at the highest possible level of OA, meaning that scientific articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere."

PLOS outlines four fundamental goals that guide the organization: break boundaries, empower researchers, redefine quality, and open science. All PLOS journals are peer-reviewed, and all 12 journals uphold rigorous ethical standards for research, publication, and scientific reporting.

PLOS does not offer advanced search options. Content is organized by topic into research communities that users can browse through, in addition to options to search for both articles and journals. The PLOS website also has resources for peer reviewers, including guidance on becoming a reviewer and on how to best participate in the peer review process.

Collection: 12 journals

Advanced Search Options: None

8. OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR, or the Directory of Open Access Repositories, is a comprehensive resource for finding free OA journals and articles. Using Google Custom Search, OpenDOAR combs through OA repositories around the world and returns relevant research in all disciplines.

The repositories it searches through are assessed and categorized by OpenDOAR staff to ensure they meet quality standards. Inclusion criteria for the database include requirements for OA content, global access, and categorically appropriate content, in addition to various other quality assurance measures. OpenDOAR has metadata, data, content, preservation, and submission policies for repositories, in addition to two OA policy statements regarding minimum and optimum recommendations.

This database allows users to browse and search repositories, which can then be selected, and articles and data can be accessed from the repository directly. As a repository database, much of the content on the site is geared toward the support of repositories and OA standards.

Collection: 5,768 repositories

Other Services: OpenDOAR offers a variety of additional services. Given the nature of the platform, services are primarily aimed at repositories and institutions, and there is a marked focus on OA in general. Sherpa services are OA archiving tools for authors and institutions.

They also offer various resources for OA support and compliance regarding standards and policies. The publication router matches publications and publishers with appropriate repositories.

There are also services and resources from JISC for repositories for cost management, discoverability, research impact, and interoperability, including ORCID consortium membership information. Additionally, a repository self-assessment tool is available for members.

Advanced Search Options:  Name, organization name, repository type, software name, content type, subject, country, region

9. Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is operated by the Bielefeld University Library in Germany, and it offers more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 sources. Sixty percent of its content is OA, and you can filter your search accordingly.

BASE has rigorous inclusion requirements for content providers regarding quality and relevance, and they maintain a list of content providers for the sake of transparency, which can be easily found on their website. BASE has a fairly elegant interface. Search results can be organized by author, title, or date.

From the search results, items can be selected and exported, added to favorites, emailed, and searched in Google Scholar. There are basic and advanced search features, with the advanced search offering numerous options for refining search criteria. There is also a feature on the website that saves recent searches without additional steps from the user.

Collection: 276,019,066 documents; 9,286 content providers

Advanced Search Options:  Author, subject, year, content provider, language, document type, access, terms of reuse

Research Databases

10. Digital Library of the Commons Repository

Run by Indiana University, the Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) Repository is a multidisciplinary journal repository that allows users to access thousands of free and OA articles from around the world. You can browse by document type, date, author, title, and more or search for keywords relevant to your topic.

DCL also offers the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons, an image database, and a keyword thesaurus for enhanced search parameters. The repository includes books, book chapters, conference papers, journal articles, surveys, theses and dissertations, and working papers. DCL advanced search features drop-down menus of search types with built-in Boolean search options.

Searches can be sorted by relevance, title, date, or submission date in ascending or descending order. Abstracts are included in selected search results, with access to full texts available, and citations can be exported from the same page. Additionally, the image database search includes tips for better search results.

Collection: 10,784

Advanced Search Options:  Author, date, title, subject, sector, region, conference

11. CIA World Factbook

The CIA World Factbook is a little different from the other resources on this list in that it is not an online journal directory or repository. It is, however, a useful free online research database for academics in a variety of disciplines.

All the information is free to access, and it provides facts about every country in the world, which are organized by category and include information about history, geography, transportation, and much more. The World Factbook can be searched by country or region, and there is also information about the world’s oceans.

This site contains resources related to the CIA as an organization rather than being a scientific journal database specifically. The site has a user interface that is easy to navigate. The site also provides a section for updates regarding changes to what information is available and how it is organized, making it easier to interact with the information you are searching for.

Collection: 266 countries

12. Paperity

Paperity boasts its status as the "first multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals and papers." Their focus is on helping you avoid paywalls while connecting you to authoritative research. In addition to providing readers with easy access to thousands of journals, Paperity seeks to help authors reach their audiences and help journals increase their exposure to boost readership.

Paperity has journal articles for every discipline, and the database offers more than a dozen advanced search options, including the length of the paper and the number of authors. There is even an option to include, exclude, or exclusively search gray papers.

Paperity is available for mobile, with both a mobile site and the Paperity Reader, an app that is available for both Android and Apple users. The database is also available on social media. You can interact with Paperity via Twitter and Facebook, and links to their social media are available on their homepage, including their Twitter feed.

Collection: 8,837,396

Advanced Search Options: Title, abstract, journal title, journal ISSN, publisher, year of publication, number of characters, number of authors, DOI, author, affiliation, language, country, region, continent, gray papers

13. dblp Computer Science Bibliography

The dblp Computer Science Bibliography is an online index of major computer science publications. dblp was founded in 1993, though until 2010 it was a university-specific database at the University of Trier in Germany. It is currently maintained by the Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics.

Although it provides access to both OA articles and those behind a paywall, you can limit your search to only OA articles. The site indexes more than three million publications, making it an invaluable resource in the world of computer science. dblp entries are color-coded based on the type of item.

dblp has an extensive FAQ section, so questions that might arise about topics like the database itself, navigating the website, or the data on dblp, in addition to several other topics, are likely to be answered. The website also hosts a blog and has a section devoted to website statistics.

Collection: 5,884,702

14. EconBiz

EconBiz is a great resource for economic and business studies. A service of the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, it offers access to full texts online, with the option of searching for OA material only. Their literature search is performed across multiple international databases.

EconBiz has an incredibly useful research skills section, with resources such as Guided Walk, a service to help students and researchers navigate searches, evaluate sources, and correctly cite references; the Research Guide EconDesk, a help desk to answer specific questions and provide advice to aid in literature searches; and the Academic Career Kit for what they refer to as Early Career Researchers.

Other helpful resources include personal literature lists, a calendar of events for relevant calls for papers, conferences, and workshops, and an economics terminology thesaurus to help in finding keywords for searches. To stay up-to-date with EconBiz, you can sign up for their newsletter.

Collection: 1,075,219

Advanced Search Options:  Title, subject, author, institution, ISBN/ISSN, journal, publisher, language, OA only

15. BioMed Central

BioMed Central provides OA research from more than 300 peer-reviewed journals. While originally focused on resources related to the physical sciences, math, and engineering, BioMed Central has branched out to include journals that cover a broader range of disciplines, with the aim of providing a single platform that provides OA articles for a variety of research needs. You can browse these journals by subject or title, or you can search all articles for your required keyword.

BioMed Central has a commitment to peer-reviewed sources and to the peer review process itself, continually seeking to help and improve the peer review process. They're "committed to maintaining high standards through full and stringent peer review." They publish the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review , which publishes research on the subject.

Additionally, the website includes resources to assist and support editors as part of their commitment to providing high-quality, peer-reviewed OA articles.

Collection: 507,212

Other Services: BMC administers the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number (ISRCTN) registry. While initially designed for registering clinical trials, since its creation in 2000, the registry has broadened its scope to include other health studies as well.

The registry is recognized by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, as well as the World Health Organization (WHO), and it meets the requirements established by the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

The study records included in the registry are all searchable and free to access. The ISRCTN registry "supports transparency in clinical research, helps reduce selective reporting of results and ensures an unbiased and complete evidence base."

Advanced Search Options:  Author, title, journal, list

A multidisciplinary search engine, JURN provides links to various scholarly websites, articles, and journals that are free to access or OA. Covering the fields of the arts, humanities, business, law, nature, science, and medicine, JURN has indexed almost 5,000 repositories to help you find exactly what you're looking for.

Search features are enhanced by Google, but searches are filtered through their index of repositories. JURN seeks to reach a wide audience, with their search engine tailored to researchers from "university lecturers and students seeking a strong search tool for OA content" and "advanced and ambitious students, age 14-18" to "amateur historians and biographers" and "unemployed and retired lecturers."

That being said, JURN is very upfront about its limitations. They admit to not being a good resource for educational studies, social studies, or psychology, and conference archives are generally not included due to frequently unstable URLs.

Collection: 5,064 indexed journals

Other Services: JURN has a browser add-on called UserScript. This add-on allows users to integrate the JURN database directly into Google Search. When performing a search through Google, the add-on creates a link that sends the search directly to JURN CSE. JURN CSE is a search service that is hosted by Google.

Clicking the link from the Google Search bar will run your search through the JURN database from the Google homepage. There is also an interface for a DuckDuckGo search box; while this search engine has an emphasis on user privacy, for smaller sites that may be indexed by JURN, DuckDuckGo may not provide the same depth of results.

Advanced Search Options:  Google search modifiers

Dryad is a digital repository of curated, OA scientific research data. Launched in 2009, it is run by a not-for-profit membership organization, with a community of institutional and publisher members for whom their services have been designed. Members include institutions such as Stanford, UCLA, and Yale, as well as publishers like Oxford University Press and Wiley.

Dryad aims to "promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely reused to create knowledge." It is free to access for the search and discovery of data. Their user experience is geared toward easy self-depositing, supports Creative Commons licensing, and provides DOIs for all their content.

Note that there is a publishing charge associated if you wish to publish your data in Dryad. When searching datasets, they are accompanied by author information and abstracts for the associated studies, and citation information is provided for easy attribution.

Collection: 44,458

Advanced Search Options: No

Run by the British Library, the E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) allows you to search over 500,000 doctoral theses in a variety of disciplines. All of the doctoral theses available on EThOS have been awarded by higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.

Although some full texts are behind paywalls, you can limit your search to items available for immediate download, either directly through EThOS or through an institution's website. More than half of the records in the database provide access to full-text theses.

EThOS notes that they do not hold all records for all institutions, but they strive to index as many doctoral theses as possible, and the database is constantly expanding, with approximately 3,000 new records added and 2,000 new full-text theses available every month. The availability of full-text theses is dependent on multiple factors, including their availability in the institutional repository and the level of repository development.

Collection: 500,000+

Advanced Search Options:  Abstract, author's first name, author's last name, awarding body, current institution, EThOS ID, year, language, qualifications, research supervisor, sponsor/funder, keyword, title

PubMed is a research platform well-known in the fields of science and medicine. It was created and developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It has been available since 1996 and offers access to "more than 33 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books."

While PubMed does not provide full-text articles directly, and many full-text articles may be behind paywalls or require subscriptions to access them, when articles are available from free sources, such as through PubMed Central (PMC), those links are provided with the citations and abstracts that PubMed does provide.

PMC, which was established in 2000 by the NLM, is a free full-text archive that includes more than 6,000,000 records. PubMed records link directly to corresponding PMC results. PMC content is provided by publishers and other content owners, digitization projects, and authors directly.

Collection: 33,000,000+

Advanced Search Options: Author's first name, author's last name, identifier, corporation, date completed, date created, date entered, date modified, date published, MeSH, book, conflict of interest statement, EC/RN number, editor, filter, grant number, page number, pharmacological action, volume, publication type, publisher, secondary source ID, text, title, abstract, transliterated title

20. Semantic Scholar

A unique and easy-to-use resource, Semantic Scholar defines itself not just as a research database but also as a "search and discovery tool." Semantic Scholar harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to efficiently sort through millions of science-related papers based on your search terms.

Through this singular application of machine learning, Semantic Scholar expands search results to include topic overviews based on your search terms, with the option to create an alert for or further explore the topic. It also provides links to related topics.

In addition, search results produce "TLDR" summaries in order to provide concise overviews of articles and enhance your research by helping you to navigate quickly and easily through the available literature to find the most relevant information. According to the site, although some articles are behind paywalls, "the data [they] have for those articles is limited," so you can expect to receive mostly full-text results.

Collection: 203,379,033

Other Services: Semantic Scholar supports multiple popular browsers. Content can be accessed through both mobile and desktop versions of Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.

Additionally, Semantic Scholar provides browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox, so AI-powered scholarly search results are never more than a click away. The mobile interface includes an option for Semantic Swipe, a new way of interacting with your research results.

There are also beta features that can be accessed as part of the Beta Program, which will provide you with features that are being actively developed and require user feedback for further improvement.

Advanced Search Options: Field of study, date range, publication type, author, journal, conference, PDF

Zenodo, powered by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), was launched in 2013. Taking its name from Zenodotus, the first librarian of the ancient library of Alexandria, Zenodo is a tool "built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in open science." Zenodo accepts all research from every discipline in any file format.

However, Zenodo also curates uploads and promotes peer-reviewed material that is available through OA. A DOI is assigned to everything that is uploaded to Zenodo, making research easily findable and citable. You can sort by keyword, title, journal, and more and download OA documents directly from the site.

While there are closed access and restricted access items in the database, the vast majority of research is OA material. Search results can be filtered by access type, making it easy to view the free articles available in the database.

Collection: 2,220,000+

Advanced Search Options:  Access, file type, keywords

Check out our roundup of free research databases as a handy one-page PDF.

How to find peer-reviewed articles.

There are a lot of free scholarly articles available from various sources. The internet is a big place. So how do you go about finding peer-reviewed articles when conducting your research? It's important to make sure you are using reputable sources.

The first source of the article is the person or people who wrote it. Checking out the author can give you some initial insight into how much you can trust what you’re reading. Looking into the publication information of your sources can also indicate whether the article is reliable.

Aspects of the article, such as subject and audience, tone, and format, are other things you can look at when evaluating whether the article you're using is valid, reputable, peer-reviewed material. So, let's break that down into various components so you can assess your research to ensure that you're using quality articles and conducting solid research.

Check the Author

Peer-reviewed articles are written by experts or scholars with experience in the field or discipline they're writing about. The research in a peer-reviewed article has to pass a rigorous evaluation process, so it’s a foregone conclusion that the author(s) of a peer-reviewed article should have experience or training related to that research.

When evaluating an article, take a look at the author’s information. What credentials does the author have to indicate that their research has scholarly weight behind it? Finding out what type of degree the author has—and what that degree is in—can provide insight into what kind of authority the author is on the subject.

Something else that might lend credence to the author’s scholarly role is their professional affiliation. A look at what organization or institution they are affiliated with can tell you a lot about their experience or expertise. Where were they trained, and who is verifying their research?

Identify Subject and Audience

The ultimate goal of a study is to answer a question. Scholarly articles are also written for scholarly audiences, especially articles that have gone through the peer review process. This means that the author is trying to reach experts, researchers, academics, and students in the field or topic the research is based on.

Think about the question the author is trying to answer by conducting this research, why, and for whom. What is the subject of the article? What question has it set out to answer? What is the purpose of finding the information? Is the purpose of the article of importance to other scholars? Is it original content?

Research should also be approached analytically. Is the methodology sound? Is the author using an analytical approach to evaluate the data that they have obtained? Are the conclusions they've reached substantiated by their data and analysis? Answering these questions can reveal a lot about the article’s validity.

Format Matters

Reliable articles from peer-reviewed sources have certain format elements to be aware of. The first is an abstract. An abstract is a short summary or overview of the article. Does the article have an abstract? It's unlikely that you're reading a peer-reviewed article if it doesn’t. Peer-reviewed journals will also have a word count range. If an article seems far too short or incredibly long, that may be reason to doubt it.

Another feature of reliable articles is the sections the information is divided into. Peer-reviewed research articles will have clear, concise sections that appropriately organize the information. This might include a literature review, methodology, and results in the case of research articles and a conclusion.

One of the most important sections is the references or bibliography. This is where the researcher lists all the sources of their information. A peer-reviewed source will have a comprehensive reference section.

An article that has been written to reach an academic community will have an academic tone. The language that is used, and the way this language is used, is important to consider. If the article is riddled with grammatical errors, confusing syntax, and casual language, it almost definitely didn't make it through the peer review process.

Also consider the use of terminology. Every discipline is going to have standard terminology or jargon that can be used and understood by other academics in the discipline. The language in a peer-reviewed article is going to reflect that.

If the author is going out of their way to explain simple terms, or terms that are standard to the field or discipline, it's unlikely that the article has been peer reviewed, as this is something that the author would be asked to address during the review process.

Publication

The source of the article will be a very good indicator of the likelihood that it was peer reviewed. Where was the article published? Was it published alongside other academic articles in the same discipline? Is it a legitimate and reputable scholarly publication?

A trade publication or newspaper might be legitimate or reputable, but it is not a scholarly source, and it will not have been subject to the peer review process. Scholarly journals are the best resource for peer-reviewed articles, but it's important to remember that not all scholarly journals are peer reviewed.

It’s helpful to look at a scholarly source’s website, as peer-reviewed journals will have a clear indication of the peer review process. University libraries, institutional repositories, and reliable databases (and you now might have a list of some legit ones) can also help provide insight into whether an article comes from a peer-reviewed journal.

Free Online Journal

Common Research Mistakes to Avoid

Research is a lot of work. Even with high standards and good intentions, it’s easy to make mistakes. Perhaps you searched for access to scientific journals for free and found the perfect peer-reviewed sources, but you forgot to document everything, and your references are a mess. Or, you only searched for free online articles and missed out on a ground-breaking study that was behind a paywall.

Whether your research is for a degree or to get published or to satisfy your own inquisitive nature, or all of the above, you want all that work to produce quality results. You want your research to be thorough and accurate.

To have any hope of contributing to the literature on your research topic, your results need to be high quality. You might not be able to avoid every potential mistake, but here are some that are both common and easy to avoid.

Sticking to One Source

One of the hallmarks of good research is a healthy reference section. Using a variety of sources gives you a better answer to your question. Even if all of the literature is in agreement, looking at various aspects of the topic may provide you with an entirely different picture than you would have if you looked at your research question from only one angle.

Not Documenting Every Fact

As you conduct your research, do yourself a favor and write everything down. Everything you include in your paper or article that you got from another source is going to need to be added to your references and cited.

It's important, especially if your aim is to conduct ethical, high-quality research, that all of your research has proper attribution. If you don't document as you go, you could end up making a lot of work for yourself if the information you don’t write down is something that later, as you write your paper, you really need.

Using Outdated Materials

Academia is an ever-changing landscape. What was true in your academic discipline or area of research ten years ago may have since been disproven. If fifteen studies have come out since the article that you're using was published, it's more than a little likely that you're going to be basing your research on flawed or dated information.

If the information you're basing your research on isn’t as up-to-date as possible, your research won't be of quality or able to stand up to any amount of scrutiny. You don’t want all of your hard work to be for naught.

Relying Solely on Open Access Journals

OA is a great resource for conducting academic research. There are high-quality journal articles available through OA, and that can be very helpful for your research. But, just because you have access to free articles, that doesn't mean that there's nothing to be found behind a paywall.

Just as dismissing high-quality peer-reviewed articles because they are OA would be limiting, not exploring any paid content at all is equally short-sighted. If you're seeking to conduct thorough and comprehensive research, exploring all of your options for quality sources is going to be to your benefit.

Digging Too Deep or Not Deep Enough

Research is an art form, and it involves a delicate balance of information. If you conduct your research using only broad search terms, you won't be able to answer your research question well, or you'll find that your research provides information that is closely related to your topic but, ultimately, your findings are vague and unsubstantiated.

On the other hand, if you delve deeply into your research topic with specific searches and turn up too many sources, you might have a lot of information that is adjacent to your topic but without focus and perhaps not entirely relevant. It's important to answer your research question concisely but thoroughly.

Different Types of Scholarly Articles

Different types of scholarly articles have different purposes. An original research article, also called an empirical article, is the product of a study or an experiment. This type of article seeks to answer a question or fill a gap in the existing literature.

Research articles will have a methodology, results, and a discussion of the findings of the experiment or research and typically a conclusion.

Review articles overview the current literature and research and provide a summary of what the existing research indicates or has concluded. This type of study will have a section for the literature review, as well as a discussion of the findings of that review. Review articles will have a particularly extensive reference or bibliography section.

Theoretical articles draw on existing literature to create new theories or conclusions, or look at current theories from a different perspective, to contribute to the foundational knowledge of the field of study.

10 Tips for Navigating Journal Databases

Use the right academic journal database for your search, be that interdisciplinary or specific to your field. Or both!

If it’s an option, set the search results to return only peer-reviewed sources.

Start by using search terms that are relevant to your topic without being overly specific.

Try synonyms, especially if your keywords aren’t returning the desired results.

Scholarly Journal Articles

Even if you’ve found some good articles, try searching using different terms.

Explore the advanced search features of the database(s).

Learn to use Booleans (AND, OR, NOT) to expand or narrow your results.

Once you’ve gotten some good results from a more general search, try narrowing your search.

Read through abstracts when trying to find articles relevant to your research.

Keep track of your research and use citation tools. It’ll make life easier when it comes time to compile your references.

7 Frequently Asked Questions

1. how do i get articles for free.

Free articles can be found through free online academic journals, OA databases, or other databases that include OA journals and articles. These resources allow you to access free papers online so you can conduct your research without getting stuck behind a paywall.

Academics don’t receive payment for the articles they contribute to journals. There are often, in fact, publication fees that scholars pay in order to publish. This is one of the funding structures that allows OA journals to provide free content so that you don’t have to pay fees or subscription costs to access journal articles.

2. How Do I Find Journal Articles?

Journal articles can be found in databases and institutional repositories that can be accessed at university libraries. However, online research databases that contain OA articles are the best resource for getting free access to journal articles that are available online.

Peer-reviewed journal articles are the best to use for academic research, and there are a number of databases where you can find peer-reviewed OA journal articles. Once you've found a useful article, you can look through the references for the articles the author used to conduct their research, and you can then search online databases for those articles, too.

3. How Do I Find Peer-Reviewed Articles?

Peer-reviewed articles can be found in reputable scholarly peer-reviewed journals. High-quality journals and journal articles can be found online using academic search engines and free research databases. These resources are excellent for finding OA articles, including peer-reviewed articles.

OA articles are articles that can be accessed for free. While some scholarly search engines and databases include articles that aren't peer reviewed, there are also some that provide only peer-reviewed articles, and databases that include non-peer-reviewed articles often have advanced search features that enable you to select “peer review only.” The database will return results that are exclusively peer-reviewed content.

4. What Are Research Databases?

A research database is a list of journals, articles, datasets, and/or abstracts that allows you to easily search for scholarly and academic resources and conduct research online. There are databases that are interdisciplinary and cover a variety of topics.

For example, Paperity might be a great resource for a chemist as well as a linguist, and there are databases that are more specific to a certain field. So, while ERIC might be one of the best educational databases available for OA content, it's not going to be one of the best databases for finding research in the field of microbiology.

5. How Do I Find Scholarly Articles for Specific Fields?

There are interdisciplinary research databases that provide articles in a variety of fields, as well as research databases that provide articles that cater to specific disciplines. Additionally, a journal repository or index can be a helpful resource for finding articles in a specific field.

When searching an interdisciplinary database, there are frequently advanced search features that allow you to narrow the search results down so that they are specific to your field. Selecting “psychology” in the advanced search features will return psychology journal articles in your search results. You can also try databases that are specific to your field.

If you're searching for law journal articles, many law reviews are OA. If you don’t know of any databases specific to history, visiting a journal repository or index and searching “history academic journals” can return a list of journals specific to history and provide you with a place to begin your research.

6. Are Peer-Reviewed Articles Really More Legitimate?

The short answer is yes, peer-reviewed articles are more legitimate resources for academic research. The peer review process provides legitimacy, as it is a rigorous review of the content of an article that is performed by scholars and academics who are experts in their field of study. The review provides an evaluation of the quality and credibility of the article.

Non-peer-reviewed articles are not subject to a review process and do not undergo the same level of scrutiny. This means that non-peer-reviewed articles are unlikely, or at least not as likely, to meet the same standards that peer-reviewed articles do.

7. Are Free Article Directories Legitimate?

Yes! As with anything, some databases are going to be better for certain requirements than others. But, a scholarly article database being free is not a reason in itself to question its legitimacy.

Free scholarly article databases can provide access to abstracts, scholarly article websites, journal repositories, and high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles. The internet has a lot of information, and it's often challenging to figure out what information is reliable. 

Research databases and article directories are great resources to help you conduct your research. Our list of the best research paper websites is sure to provide you with sources that are totally legit.

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Volume 626 Issue 8000, 22 February 2024

Smoke alarm.

Everyone’s immune system responds to challenges differently. A lot of this is a result of age, sex and genetics, but environmental factors such as lifestyle could also contribute. In this week’s issue, Darragh Duffy, Violaine Saint-André and colleagues explore the effects of 136 environmental factors on the immune responses of 1,000 individuals. Of all the factors studied, smoking had a significant influence, affecting both innate (general) and adaptive (pathogen-specific) immunity. Although the effects on innate immunity disappeared after the smokers stopped smoking, the effects on adaptive immunity continued for many years after quitting, altering the levels of cytokine released after infection, for example.

Cover image: Wirestock, Inc./Alamy

It’s time for countries to honour their million-dollar biodiversity pledges

Promises to safeguard biodiversity need to be translated into money in the bank.

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Science can drive development and unity in Africa — as it does in the US and Europe

A plan to establish Africa’s first continent-wide science fund should not be delayed any longer.

Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret

First-of-its-kind US bill would address the environmental costs of the technology, but there’s a long way to go.

  • Kate Crawford

How to boost your research: take a sabbatical in policy

Academic researchers have a unique opportunity to benefit society — and their research — by spending time in government.

  • Jordan Dworkin

Research Highlights

A dna clutch controls a golden nanomachine.

The engine of a microscopic motor can be coupled or uncoupled from the rotor by means of DNA coatings that respond to a variety of stimuli.

Great ‘Stone Age’ wall discovered in Baltic Sea

Megastructure stretching nearly 1 kilometre long is probably one of the oldest known hunting aids on Earth.

The immune markers that predict who can keep SARS-CoV-2 in check

People infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 cleared the virus more quickly if they had high levels of certain immune cells.

What a tease! Great apes pull hair and poke each other for fun

The animals’ shenanigans hint that mischievous play evolved well before Homo sapiens did.

News in Focus

How journals are fighting back against a wave of questionable images.

Publishers are deploying AI-based tools to detect suspicious images, but generative AI threatens their efforts.

  • Nicola Jones

Climatologist Michael Mann wins defamation case: what it means for scientists

Jury awards Mann more than US$1 million — raising hopes for scientists who are attacked politically because of their work.

  • Jeff Tollefson

China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research misconduct

Universities must declare all their retractions and launch investigations into misconduct cases; a Nature analysis reveals that since 2021 there have been more than 17,000 retractions with Chinese co-authors.

  • Smriti Mallapaty

Glow way! Bioluminescent houseplant hits US market for first time

Engineered petunia emits a continuous green glow thanks to genes from a light-up mushroom.

  • Katherine Bourzac

‘Geometry can be very simple, but totally deep’: meet top maths prizewinner Claire Voisin

Voisin won this year’s Crafoord Prize in Mathematics for research inspired by string theory, and work on a million-dollar unsolved problem.

  • Davide Castelvecchi

Introducing meat–rice: grain with added muscles beefs up protein

The laboratory-grown food uses rice as a scaffold for cultured meat.

  • Jude Coleman

Largest post-pandemic survey finds trust in scientists is high

Study of more than 70,000 people suggests that trust levels vary among countries and are linked to political orientation.

  • Carissa Wong

Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets

Implants and other technologies that decode neural activity can restore people’s abilities to move and speak — and help researchers to understand how the brain works.

  • Miryam Naddaf

Scientists under arrest: the researchers taking action over climate change

Fed up with a lack of political progress in solving the climate problem, some researchers are becoming activists to slow global warming.

  • Daniel Grossman

Books & Arts

Book review, greener cities: a necessity or a luxury.

Are urban trees and parks essential to improving the environment and human health — or just a sop to middle-class ideals of gentrification? Two books debate these opposing views.

  • Timon McPhearson

Gripped by dinosaurs, and a unified theory of behaviour: Books in Brief

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

  • Andrew Robinson

Correspondence

Triple win: solar farms in deserts can boost power, incomes and ecosystems.

  • Haimeng Liu
  • Jianguo Liu

Stockholm declaration on AI ethics: why others should sign

  • Ross D. King
  • Teresa Scassa
  • Hiroaki Kitano

Pay rises for Serbia’s top 10% of research scientists

  • Dejan Brkić

New Chinese databases are a boost for rare-disease science

  • Jishizhan Chen

How my academic sabbatical offered a chance to hit the restart button on my career

Time away from his daily responsibilities taught Brandon Brown that he is replaceable — and that’s a good thing.

  • Brandon Brown

Technology Feature

Super-speedy sequencing puts genomic diagnosis in the fast lane.

Streamlined workflows for DNA and RNA sequencing are helping clinicians to deliver prompt, targeted care to people in days — or even hours.

  • Michael Eisenstein

Collection:

Where I Work

Building precision instruments to explore the cosmos.

Phil Korngut tests NASA’s SPHEREx telescope under extreme conditions at his laboratory in California.

  • Rachael Pells

News & Views

Rare isotopes formed in prelude to γ-ray burst.

The afterglow of a long burst of γ-rays suggests that the events leading to these explosions can be sizeable sources of some of the Universe’s rare isotopes — and that classifications of γ-ray bursts are too simplistic.

  • Daniel Kasen

A neural circuit for navigation keeps flies on target

Studies reveal how neuronal populations in the fruit fly brain work together to compare the direction of a goal with the direction that the fly is facing, and convert this into a signal that steers the fly towards its target.

  • Katherine Nagel

Energetic laser pulses alter outcomes of X-ray studies of proteins

Cutting-edge X-ray sources have enabled the structural dynamics of proteins to be tracked during biochemical processes, but the findings have been questioned. Two experts discuss the implications of a study that digs into this issue.

  • Richard Neutze
  • R. J. Dwayne Miller

Nanotraps boost light intensity for future optical devices

A method for configuring light-trapping devices promises better optical nanodevices by amplifying light and enhancing the emission efficiency of luminescent nanomaterials — without the need for complex technology upgrades.

  • Kirill Koshelev

From the archive: Tutankhamun’s coffin, and Darwin shares a letter

Snippets from Nature ’s past.

Smoking’s lasting effect on the immune system

It emerges from a study of human cells that smoking can influence certain immune responses to the same extent as can age or genetics. Smoking can alter the immune system in ways that persist long after quitting the habit.

  • Simon Stent

How population size shapes the evolution of guppy fish

A long-term fish experiment reveals how a mechanism called density dependence, in which the population growth rate slows as the number of individuals rises, affects population dynamics on time scales relevant for ecology and evolution.

  • Bernt-Erik Sæther

Natural killer cell therapies

This Review explores in detail the complexity of NK cell biology in humans and highlights the role of these cells in cancer immunity.

  • Eric Vivier
  • Lucas Rebuffet
  • Valeria R. Fantin

Heavy-element production in a compact object merger observed by JWST

Observations from the JWST of the second brightest GRB ever detected, GRB 230307A, indicate that it belongs to the class of long-duration GRBs resulting from compact object mergers, with the decay of lanthanides powering the longlasting optical and infrared emission.

  • Andrew J. Levan
  • Benjamin P. Gompertz
  • David Alexander Kann

A lanthanide-rich kilonova in the aftermath of a long gamma-ray burst

A modelling analysis shows that an unusually long gamma-ray burst gave rise to a lanthanide-rich kilonova following the merger of a neutron star–neutron star or of a neutron star–black hole.

  • Yu-Han Yang
  • Eleonora Troja
  • Ignacio Pérez-García

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Artificial intelligence control is used to avoid the emergence of disruptive tearing instabilities in the magnetically confined fusion plasma in the DIII-D tokamak reactor.

  • SangKyeun Kim
  • Egemen Kolemen

Signatures of a surface spin–orbital chiral metal

A spin–orbital- and angular-momentum-sensitive methodology used to study Sr 2 RuO 4 reveals subtle spectroscopic signatures that are consistent with the formation of spin–orbital chiral currents at the surface of the material.

  • Federico Mazzola
  • Wojciech Brzezicki
  • Antonio Vecchione

Fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in multilayer graphene

Integer and fractional quantum anomalous Hall effects in a rhombohedral pentalayer graphene–hBN moiré superlattice are observed, providing an ideal platform for exploring charge fractionalization and (non-Abelian) anyonic braiding at zero magnetic field.

  • Zhengguang Lu
  • Tonghang Han

Directive giant upconversion by supercritical bound states in the continuum

An experimental design consisting of a photonic-crystal nanoslab covered with upconversion nanoparticles demonstrates the phenomenon of supercritical coupling, resulting in giant enhancement of upconversion by photonic bound states in the continuum.

  • Chiara Schiattarella
  • Silvia Romano
  • Gianluigi Zito

A 3D nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity

Optical nanoscale disk memory with petabit-level capacity is developed by extending the recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, and exabit-level storage can be achieved by stacking the disks into arrays.

Twisted-layer boron nitride ceramic with high deformability and strength

A bulk ceramic composed of interlocked boron nitride nanoplates with a laminated structure of twist-stacked nanoslices is created using hot-pressing and spark plasma sintering, which exhibits large elastic and plastic deformability and high strength at room temperature.

  • Yongjun Tian

Progressive unanchoring of Antarctic ice shelves since 1973

Pinning-point changes over three epochs spanning the periods 1973–1989, 1989–2000 and 2000−2022 were measured, and by proxy the changes to ice-shelf thickness back to 1973–1989 were inferred.

  • Bertie W. J. Miles
  • Robert G. Bingham

Fertilizer management for global ammonia emission reduction

A machine learning model for generating crop-specific and spatially explicit NH 3 emission factors globally shows that global NH 3 emissions in 2018 were lower than previous estimates that did not fully consider fertilizer management practices.

  • Benjamin Z. Houlton
  • Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals

Convergence of coronary artery disease genes onto endothelial cell programs

Variant-to-gene-to-program is a new approach to building maps of genome function to link risk variants to disease genes and to convergent signalling pathways in an unbiased manner; its strength is demonstrated in coronary artery disease.

  • Gavin R. Schnitzler
  • Jesse M. Engreitz

Converting an allocentric goal into an egocentric steering signal

In  Drosophila , FC2 neurons signal a navigational goal, which is compared with the fly’s heading by PFL3 neurons to guide moment-to-moment steering.

  • Peter Mussells Pires
  • Lingwei Zhang
  • Gaby Maimon

Transforming a head direction signal into a goal-oriented steering command

Here we show how PFL2 and PFL3 neurons in the Drosophila brain compare a representation of direction with internal spatial goals, both anchored in world-centric coordinates, and produce body-centric steering commands that act to correct deviations from the goal direction. 

  • Elena A. Westeinde
  • Emily Kellogg
  • Rachel I. Wilson

Smoking changes adaptive immunity with persistent effects

A survey of 136 factors that may influence cytokine secretion identify smoking, cytomegalovirus latent infection and body mass index as influential factors, with varying effects on innate and adaptive immunity.

  • Violaine Saint-André
  • Bruno Charbit
  • Christophe Zimmer

The HIV capsid mimics karyopherin engagement of FG-nucleoporins

Dissection of the nuclear pore complex provides a model in which the HIV capsid enters the nucleus through karyopherin mimicry, a mechanism likely to be conserved across other viruses.

  • C. F. Dickson
  • D. A. Jacques

HIV-1 capsids enter the FG phase of nuclear pores like a transport receptor

The HIV-1 capsid behaves like a nuclear transport receptor entering and traversing an FG phase, with its interior serving as a cargo container, bypassing an otherwise effective barrier to viral infection.

  • Erika N. Weiskopf
  • Dirk Görlich

Bile salt hydrolase acyltransferase activity expands bile acid diversity

Acyltransferase activity of the enzyme bile salt hydrolase is identified and shown to mediate microbial bile acid conjugation, diversifying the bile acid pool and expanding their role in gut physiology.

  • Douglas V. Guzior
  • Maxwell Okros
  • Robert A. Quinn

Bile salt hydrolase catalyses formation of amine-conjugated bile acids

We find that bile salt hydrolase N -acyltransferase activity can form bacterial bile acid amidates that are positively correlated with the colonization of gut bacteria that assist in the regulation of the bile acid metabolic network.

  • Bipin Rimal
  • Stephanie L. Collins
  • Andrew D. Patterson

The nuclear factor ID3 endows macrophages with a potent anti-tumour activity

The Kupffer cell lineage-determining factor ID3 selectively endows macrophages with the ability to phagocytose live tumour cells and orchestrate the recruitment, proliferation and activation of natural killer and CD8 + T lymphoid effector cells to restrict the growth of a variety of tumours.

  • Pierre-Louis Loyher
  • Frederic Geissmann

Stress response silencing by an E3 ligase mutated in neurodegeneration

The E3 ligase SIFI is identified as a dedicated silencing factor of the integrated stress response, a finding that has implications for the development of therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases caused by mitochondrial protein import stress.

  • Diane L. Haakonsen
  • Michael Heider
  • Michael Rapé

An epigenetic barrier sets the timing of human neuronal maturation

The slow maturation of human neurons is regulated by epigenetic modification in nascent neurons, mediated by EZH2, EHMT1, EHMT2 and DOT1L.

  • Gabriele Ciceri
  • Arianna Baggiolini
  • Lorenz Studer

Translation selectively destroys non-functional transcription complexes

Translation actively dislodges stalled transcription elongation complexes (ECs) from damaged DNA, which enables lesion repair and restoration of transcription activity, and coupled ribosomes discriminate between active ECs and stalled ECs, ensuring destruction of only the latter.

  • Jason Woodgate
  • Hamed Mosaei
  • Nikolay Zenkin

Conformational ensembles of the human intrinsically disordered proteome

A computational model generates conformational ensembles of 28,058 intrinsically disordered proteins and regions (IDRs) in the human proteome and sheds light on the relationship between sequence, conformational properties and functions of IDRs.

  • Giulio Tesei
  • Anna Ida Trolle
  • Kresten Lindorff-Larsen

Influence of pump laser fluence on ultrafast myoglobin structural dynamics

Ultrafast time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography is used to investigate a photodissociation reaction in a protein, revealing the strong impact of the pump laser fluence on the structural changes  and the reaction mechanism.

  • Thomas R. M. Barends
  • Alexander Gorel
  • Ilme Schlichting

Amendments & Corrections

Author correction: satellite mapping reveals extensive industrial activity at sea.

  • Fernando S. Paolo
  • David Kroodsma
  • Patrick Halpin

Publisher Correction: Revising the global biogeography of annual and perennial plants

  • Tyler Poppenwimer
  • Itay Mayrose
  • Niv DeMalach

Publisher Correction: Developmental dynamics of two bipotent thymic epithelial progenitor types

  • Anja Nusser
  • Thomas Boehm

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research paper read online

How to Read a Research Paper – A Guide to Setting Research Goals, Finding Papers to Read, and More

If you work in a scientific field, you should try to build a deep and unbiased understanding of that field. This not only educates you in the best possible way but also helps you envision the opportunities in your space.

A research paper is often the culmination of a wide range of deep and authentic practices surrounding a topic. When writing a research paper, the author thinks critically about the problem, performs rigorous research, evaluates their processes and sources, organizes their thoughts, and then writes. These genuinely-executed practices make for a good research paper.

If you’re struggling to build a habit of reading papers (like I am) on a regular basis, I’ve tried to break down the whole process. I've talked to researchers in the field, read a bunch of papers and blogs from distinguished researchers, and jotted down some techniques that you can follow.

Let’s start off by understanding what a research paper is and what it is NOT!

What is a Research Paper?

A research paper is a dense and detailed manuscript that compiles a thorough understanding of a problem or topic. It offers a proposed solution and further research along with the conditions under which it was deduced and carried out, the efficacy of the solution and the research performed, and potential loopholes in the study.

A research paper is written not only to provide an exceptional learning opportunity but also to pave the way for further advancements in the field. These papers help other scholars germinate the thought seed that can either lead to a new world of ideas or an innovative method of solving a longstanding problem.

What Research Papers are NOT

There is a common notion that a research paper is a well-informed summary of a problem or topic written by means of other sources.

But you shouldn't mistake it for a book or an opinionated account of an individual’s interpretation of a particular topic.

Why Should You Read Research Papers?

What I find fascinating about reading a good research paper is that you can draw on a profound study of a topic and engage with the community on a new perspective to understand what can be achieved in and around that topic.

I work at the intersection of instructional design and data science. Learning is part of my day-to-day responsibilities. If the source of my education is flawed or inefficient, I’d fail at my job in the long term. This applies to many other jobs in Science with a special focus on research.

There are three important reasons to read a research paper:

  • Knowledge —  Understanding the problem from the eyes of someone who has probably spent years solving it and has taken care of all the edge cases that you might not think of at the beginning.
  • Exploration —  Whether you have a pinpointed agenda or not, there is a very high chance that you will stumble upon an edge case or a shortcoming that is worth following up. With persistent efforts over a considerable amount of time, you can learn to use that knowledge to make a living.
  • Research and review —  One of the main reasons for writing a research paper is to further the development in the field. Researchers read papers to review them for conferences or to do a literature survey of a new field. For example, Yann LeCun’ s paper on integrating domain constraints into backpropagation set the foundation of modern computer vision back in 1989. After decades of research and development work, we have come so far that we're now perfecting problems like object detection and optimizing autonomous vehicles.

Not only that, with the help of the internet, you can extrapolate all of these reasons or benefits onto multiple business models. It can be an innovative state-of-the-art product, an efficient service model, a content creator, or a dream job where you are solving problems that matter to you.

Goals for Reading a Research Paper — What Should You Read About?

The first thing to do is to figure out your motivation for reading the paper. There are two main scenarios that might lead you to read a paper:

  • Scenario 1 —  You have a well-defined agenda/goal and you are deeply invested in a particular field. For example, you’re an NLP practitioner and you want to learn how GPT-4 has given us a breakthrough in NLP. This is always a nice scenario to be in as it offers clarity.
  • Scenario 2 —  You want to keep abreast of the developments in a host of areas, say how a new deep learning architecture has helped us solve a 50-year old biological problem of understanding protein structures. This is often the case for beginners or for people who consume their daily dose of news from research papers (yes, they exist!).

If you’re an inquisitive beginner with no starting point in mind, start with scenario 2. Shortlist a few topics you want to read about until you find an area that you find intriguing. This will eventually lead you to scenario 1.

ML Reproducibility Challenge

In addition to these generic goals, if you need an end goal for your habit-building exercise of reading research papers, you should check out the ML reproducibility challenge.

1

You’ll find top-class papers from world-class conferences that are worth diving deep into and reproducing the results.

They conduct this challenge twice a year and they have one coming up in Spring 2021. You should study the past three versions of the challenge, and I’ll write a detailed post on what to expect, how to prepare, and so on.

Now you must be wondering – how can you find the right paper to read?

How to Find the Right Paper to Read

In order to get some ideas around this, I reached out to my friend, Anurag Ghosh who is a researcher at Microsoft. Anurag has been working at the crossover of computer vision, machine learning, and systems engineering.

Screenshot-2021-03-04-at-12.08.31-AM

Here are a few of his tips for getting started:

  • Always pick an area you're interested in.
  • Read a few good books or detailed blog posts on that topic and start diving deep by reading the papers referenced in those resources.
  • Look for seminal papers around that topic. These are papers that report a major breakthrough in the field and offer a new method perspective with a huge potential for subsequent research in that field. Check out papers from the morning paper or C VF - test of time award/Helmholtz prize (if you're interested in computer vision).
  • Check out books like Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications by Richard Szeliski and look for the papers referenced there.
  • Have and build a sense of community. Find people who share similar interests, and join groups/subreddits/discord channels where such activities are promoted.

In addition to these invaluable tips, there are a number of web applications that I’ve shortlisted that help me narrow my search for the right papers to read:

  • r/MachineLearning  — there are many researchers, practitioners, and engineers who share their work along with the papers they've found useful in achieving those results.

Screenshot-2021-03-01-at-10.55.53-PM

  • Arxiv Sanity Preserver  — built by Andrej Karpathy to accelerate research. It is a repository of 142,846 papers from computer science, machine learning, systems, AI, Stats, CV, and so on. It also offers a bunch of filters, powerful search functionality, and a discussion forum to make for a super useful research platform.

Screenshot-2021-03-01-at-10.59.41-PM

  • Google Research  — the research teams at Google are working on problems that have an impact on our everyday lives. They share their publications for individuals and teams to learn from, contribute to, and expedite research. They also have a Google AI blog that you can check out.

Screenshot-2021-03-01-at-11.13.31-PM

How to Read a Research Paper

After you have stocked your to-read list, then comes the process of reading these papers. Remember that NOT every paper is useful to read and we need a mechanism that can help us quickly screen papers that are worth reading.

To tackle this challenge, you can use this Three-Pass Approach by S. Keshav . This approach proposes that you read the paper in three passes instead of starting from the beginning and diving in deep until the end.

The three pass approach

  • The first pass —  is a quick scan to capture a high-level view of the paper. Read the title, abstract, and introduction carefully followed by the headings of the sections and subsections and lastly the conclusion. It should take you no more than 5–10 mins to figure out if you want to move to the second pass.
  • The second pass —  is a more focused read without checking for the technical proofs. You take down all the crucial notes, underline the key points in the margins. Carefully study the figures, diagrams, and illustrations. Review the graphs, mark relevant unread references for further reading. This helps you understand the background of the paper.
  • The third pass —  reaching this pass denotes that you’ve found a paper that you want to deeply understand or review. The key to the third pass is to reproduce the results of the paper. Check it for all the assumptions and jot down all the variations in your re-implementation and the original results. Make a note of all the ideas for future analysis. It should take 5–6 hours for beginners and 1–2 hours for experienced readers.

Tools and Software to Keep Track of Your Pipeline of Papers

If you’re sincere about reading research papers, your list of papers will soon grow into an overwhelming stack that is hard to keep track of. Fortunately, we have software that can help us set up a mechanism to manage our research.

Here are a bunch of them that you can use:

  • Mendeley [not free]  — you can add papers directly to your library from your browser, import documents, generate references and citations, collaborate with fellow researchers, and access your library from anywhere. This is mostly used by experienced researchers.

Screenshot-2021-03-02-at-1.28.19-AM

  • Zotero [free & open source] —  Along the same lines as Mendeley but free of cost. You can make use of all the features but with limited storage space.

Screenshot-2021-03-02-at-1.42.28-AM

  • Notion —  this is great if you are just starting out and want to use something lightweight with the option to organize your papers, jot down notes, and manage everything in one workspace. It might not stand anywhere in comparison with the above tools but I personally feel comfortable using Notion and I have created this board to keep track of my progress for now that you can duplicate:

2

⚠️ Symptoms of Reading a Research Paper

Reading a research paper can turn out to be frustrating, challenging, and time-consuming especially when you’re a beginner. You might face the following common symptoms:

  • You might start feeling dumb for not understanding a thing a paper says.
  • Finding yourself pushing too hard to understand the math behind those proofs.
  • Beating your head against the wall to wrap it around the number of acronyms used in the paper. Just kidding, you’ll have to look up those acronyms every now and then.
  • Being stuck on one paragraph for more than an hour.

Here’s a complete list of emotions that you might undergo as explained by Adam Ruben in this article .

Key Takeaways

We should be all set to dive right in. Here’s a quick summary of what we have covered here:

  • A research paper is an in-depth study that offers an detailed explanation of a topic or problem along with the research process, proofs, explained results, and ideas for future work.
  • Read research papers to develop a deep understanding of a topic/problem. Then you can either review papers as part of being a researcher, explore the domain and the kind of problems to build a solution or startup around it, or you can simply read them to keep abreast of the developments in your domain of interest.
  • If you’re a beginner, start with exploration to soon find your path to goal-oriented research.
  • In order to find good papers to read, you can use websites like arxiv-sanity, google research, and subreddits like r/MachineLearning.
  • Reading approach — Use the 3-pass method to find a paper.
  • Keep track of your research, notes, developments by using tools like Zotero/Notion.
  • This can get overwhelming in no time. Make sure you start off easy and increment your load progressively.

Remember: Art is not a single method or step done over a weekend but a process of accomplishing remarkable results over time.

You can also watch the video on this topic on my YouTube channel :

Feel free to respond to this blog or comment on the video if you have some tips, questions, or thoughts!

If this tutorial was helpful, you should check out my data science and machine learning courses on Wiplane Academy . They are comprehensive yet compact and helps you build a solid foundation of work to showcase.

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English Language Requirement and Educational Inequality: Evidence from 16 Million College Applicants in China

This paper studies the unintended effect of English language requirement on educational inequality by investigating how the staggered rollout of English listening tests in China’s high-stakes National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) affected the rural-urban gap in college access. Leveraging administrative data covering the universe of NCEE participants between 1999 and 2003, we find that the introduction of English listening tests significantly lowered rural students’ exam score percentile ranks relative to their urban counterparts, resulting in a 30% increase in the rural-urban gap in college access. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that, as a result of this policy change, more than 54,000 rural students lost college seats to their urban peers between 1999 and 2003, and another 11,000 rural students who elite colleges could have admitted ended up in non-elite colleges, causing them significant future income losses.

I have read the NBER disclosure policy and attest that this acknowledgment discloses all sources of funding and all material and relevant financial relationships. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Digital literacy expert explains differences between reading in print and online

by Amy Wolf, University of Delaware

Digital literacy expert explains differences between reading in print and online

Rachel Karchmer-Klein, associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Delaware, co-designed a research study where a group of high-achieving eighth graders were asked to engage with a digital narrative text. The story incorporated written words, sound, static images and video animations. The students quickly figured out they had to interact with it similarly to playing a video game in order to keep the story moving along.

When students were asked questions about the narrative, Karchmer-Klein and her colleague found that the students were focused so much on the written words that they missed a lot of the details.

"The details of the story and the fun and really cool stuff that came out in the narrative text were told through the sounds and the pictures," said Karchmer-Klein, who teaches courses in literacy and educational technology at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels in CEHD's School of Education. "They engaged with it, but because they were focusing on the words that were presented in the digital texts, they missed a lot of details."

It comes as no surprise that the students were so focused on the written words, Karchmer-Klein said, since that was what they've been taught to do since kindergarten.

"Overall, readers privilege the written word," she said. "One reason is because K-12 schooling spends most of its instructional time teaching kids to read and write written language. We assume that because kids today are growing up with digital devices that they can figure out how to communicate effectively with them. We don't spend time teaching other modalities like how to make meaning from audio, sound and moving images. Yet, there is a robust line of research indicating the need for this instruction. So just like we teach phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency, we need to teach these reading skills beginning in kindergarten."

Karchmer-Klein said there are four unique characteristics of digital texts—the medium we use to communicate over the internet—we should teach students. The first is that digital texts are nonlinear. With a printed book (in the English language), the reader reads left to right, top to bottom. But when engaging with a digital text, reading tends to be nonlinear and many times non-sequential—the reader does not have to go through the text in a sequential manner to make sense of the text.

A second characteristic is that while a physical book is static—once printed, it can't be changed—but a digital text is malleable. Karchmer-Klein informs students that when doing research online, a source they find can be gone or altered within a day, or even within minutes.

Technology also allows students to connect with anyone in the world.

"As soon as I, as the teacher, am allowing my students to get onto the internet, for example, I am opening a door to resources that I can't necessarily constrain," Karchmer-Klein said. "Whereas when I give a traditionally printed textbook to my class, I know what is in it and it can't be modified."

The final difference is multimodality—the use of multiple modes. Modes are signs or symbols, and their meaning comes from social and cultural uses and interpretations. Digital text consists of multiple modes pieced together. Examples are live or recorded speech, still or moving images, music, ambient sounds and tactility through touch screens. When these modes are combined with written language into one digital text, they require a high level of cognitive flexibility, meaning readers must navigate among and between modes to understand the content and progress forward in the text.

Texts, whether they be narrative or informational, typically have written language. Early literacy education tends to focus on the written word, the alphabet and phonemic awareness.

"What we don't do is spend a lot of time talking about all of these other modalities that can actually come into play and hold the cognitive load of meaning," Karchmer-Klein said. "So sure, we use picture books and we teach kids that pictures can hold meaning, especially when kids are really young, but that kind of all goes away as kids get older and we really focus on the words, which are important. But if you look at digital texts, there are a lot of other modalities that become not just supplemental, not just as important as the written word, but sometimes even more important."

Some studies have shown that when people read on-screen, they don't understand what they've read as well as when they read in print. But Karchmer-Klein said there are many variables that can affect one's comprehension when reading online—such as the age of a digital device and the reader's comfort level using it—and that reading strategies are much more important than the tool itself.

"Say I have a book and I also have a website, and I want you to use the strategy of close reading. That strategy is an evidence-based strategy. It's been systematically studied, and it's been proven to be a useful strategy with kids," she said. "So the tool—whether it be I'm using this passage that is traditionally printed or I'm using it on technology—doesn't matter. What matters is that I'm using an evidence-based strategy. The bottom line is it's the strategy. It's not the tool."

The technology isn't going anywhere, and students need to learn how to use it responsibly, Karchmer-Klein said. Much like many educators in the '90s and early 2000s were hesitant to bring the internet into classrooms, the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in educational settings is now a hot topic.

"With the internet, the argument was, 'This isn't going away. We've got to figure out how to use it,'" Karchmer-Klein said. "The same thing is happening now with AI, which is why we have to figure this out, because these kids are going to have to know how to use it for the workplace. The best thing that we can do is not shy away from the things that we have today and, instead, get grounded in what we know."

The biggest issue with technology, Karchmer-Klein said, is that people don't know how to critically analyze information—a problem that is only getting worse with the expansion of generative AI.

Most high school and college students get their news from social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, but these students don't understand the algorithms that these sites and search engines use—and they're often unable to determine what's misinformation.

"Nobody teaches you how to use social media. We just assume that people know how to use it. There's a lot of ugly stuff that happens there, and that's why we have so many people who are misinformed," she said. "Teaching critical thinking skills, beginning in kindergarten and first grade, is so important, because all these skills continue to build up more and more and more and more to the higher grades."

When schools and workplaces went virtual at the start of the pandemic, it became especially clear that most people didn't know how to use technology, Karchmer-Klein said, also noting that a good thing that came from the pandemic was that access to technology became less of an issue.

Karchmer-Klein said "there's no deep reading on the internet," but a main reason for that is that students aren't taught how to read online.

"We've all had instructions on how to read a book, but we haven't had instructions on how to read online," she said. "So it's hard to compare these things when you've been instructed how to do one thing, but not on the other."

Students need to learn that meaning can come from pictures, graphics, sounds—things other than words. They need to know that reading online is not always left to right, top to bottom—like it is in a traditionally printed text. Students need to learn that they might need to click on a link for more information and then come back to finish reading the original text.

That said, parents and educators certainly shouldn't toss all the hard copy books.

"There needs to be a balance," Karchmer-Klein said. "I don't think they should be on a computer all day long. I think that's horrible, too. But I do think it should be enough that they're exposed to technology, just like they should be exposed to books. I love books. I would hate it if my kid didn't have a book in front of them. I think there needs to be a balance. I think that's the smart thing to do."

Provided by University of Delaware

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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title: an interactive agent foundation model.

Abstract: The development of artificial intelligence systems is transitioning from creating static, task-specific models to dynamic, agent-based systems capable of performing well in a wide range of applications. We propose an Interactive Agent Foundation Model that uses a novel multi-task agent training paradigm for training AI agents across a wide range of domains, datasets, and tasks. Our training paradigm unifies diverse pre-training strategies, including visual masked auto-encoders, language modeling, and next-action prediction, enabling a versatile and adaptable AI framework. We demonstrate the performance of our framework across three separate domains -- Robotics, Gaming AI, and Healthcare. Our model demonstrates its ability to generate meaningful and contextually relevant outputs in each area. The strength of our approach lies in its generality, leveraging a variety of data sources such as robotics sequences, gameplay data, large-scale video datasets, and textual information for effective multimodal and multi-task learning. Our approach provides a promising avenue for developing generalist, action-taking, multimodal systems.

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New tool will make math-heavy research papers easier to view online

T he complex formulas in physics, math and engineering papers might be intimidatingly difficult reading matter for some, but there are many people who have trouble merely seeing them in the first place. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created a tool that makes these papers easier on the eyes for those with visual disabilities, and it's about to be adopted in a major way.

The tool, which converts one commonly used format for displaying math formulas into another, could help make the latest and greatest research papers accessible to all. Most new research papers are distributed as PDF files, which many people in the research community have difficulty reading.

According to the World Health Organization, more than a quarter of the world's population has a diagnosed vision impairment, and Yale's Center for Dyslexia and Creativity reports that in the United States 20% of people have dyslexia. In a recent study of scientific papers distributed as PDFs, researchers found that only 2.4% of the documents they sampled satisfied their accessibility criteria.

"If you're not someone who has been struggling to publish math papers all your life, you might wonder why this is a problem," said NIST's Bruce Miller, a physicist by training who specializes in math software. "PDFs look great on the printed page. But if you want math formulas to be read out loud, or be legible on a different-sized screen, like a tablet or a phone, the mismatch can be painful. You can't easily repurpose PDFs for other media."

How are PDFs typically generated? A scientist creating a paper manuscript that uses many formulas will generally use the language LaTeX (pronounced "lay-tech") or one of its close relatives to render the formulas. LaTeX has been in use since the 1980s and is widely respected for the high-quality typesetting that it creates, but it is designed to produce printed pages in static form.

Since the 1990s, webpage creators have used HTML, which makes it possible to adjust the look, behavior and layout of the displayed text depending on its context. If you've ever dragged a webpage into a different size and watched its text smoothly reposition itself to fit within the new rectangle's boundaries, you are seeing a feature that readers with vision disabilities want.

Modern HTML includes extensions that not only permit this ability to "re-flow" type, but also allow the math formulas to be read aloud by machine for those who can't read the text themselves. These features make HTML ideal for creating accessible text, but for years there was no effective way to convert LaTeX into HTML. This presented a problem to Miller when he needed a way to bring the more than 1,000 pages of NIST's venerable Handbook of Mathematical Functions into the digital realm.

"At the time, some programs purported to convert LaTeX to webpages, but none worked well enough," he said. "I figured, let's try to make our own."

The resulting NIST tool was LaTeXML , which reads a LaTeX source file and builds a representation of the document that it can turn into HTML. LaTeXML was the key to creating the online Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, and several years later the managers of a major online resource realized it could help them too.

This resource is arXiv (pronounced "archive"), a repository of scholarly articles that have yet to be published in scientific journals. Maintained by Cornell University, arXiv currently hosts more than 2 million articles that are free to view and download as PDFs. The server has become a prominent way station, where authors can post findings and discuss them with their peers before formally announcing them.

"Per a survey arXiv conducted in 2022, only 30% of users who rely on assistive technology can access all of the research they need without help. The same survey found that PDF formatting is the biggest barrier," said Shamsi Brinn, lead researcher on arXiv 's accessibility report and manager of the HTML papers project.

That will change with arXiv 's use of the LaTeXML converter, Brinn said. The server will generate HTML versions of papers and include the HTML version next to the link to download a PDF.

The arXiv repository will convert papers on a rolling basis, offering the first in December 2023. The move follows a broader trend of requiring accessible web and electronic information, according to Joe Zesski, assistant director of the Northeast ADA Center. Not only will the change help the scientific community adhere to the White House's updated policy on making federally-funded research freely available, but it will also make information accessible to young scientists, who have grown up using electronic resources.

"There is a growing reliance on the web and electronic information in education alongside a growing expectation of equal access by and for young people with disabilities," Zesski said. "Taking steps to make the information those students will need to access accessible and usable to them is important."

Provided by National Institute of Standards and Technology

A schematic for creating the SciA11y HTML render from a paper PDF. Starting with the raw two-column PDF on the left, S2ORC [24] is used to extract the title, authors, abstract, section headers, body text, and references. S2ORC also identifies links between inline citations and references to figures and table objects. DeepFigures [43] is used to extract figures and tables, along with their captions. The output of these two models is merged with metadata from the Semantic Scholar API. Heuristics are used to construct a table of contents, insert figures and tables in the appropriate places in the text, and repair broken URLs. We add HTML headers as illustrated (header tags for sections, paragraph tags for body text, and figure tags for figures and tables); highlighted components (table of contents and links in references) are not in the PDF and novel navigational features that we introduce to the HTML render. An example HTML render of parts of a paper document is shown to the right (the actual render is a single column, which is split here for presentation). Credit: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.00076.pdf

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  • In the spirit of responsible open science, we’re releasing this model under a Creative Commons NonCommercial license for researchers to further explore.

As humans, much of what we learn about the world around us—particularly in our early stages of life—is gleaned through observation. Take Newton’s third law of motion: Even an infant (or a cat) can intuit, after knocking several items off a table and observing the results, that what goes up must come down. You don’t need hours of instruction or to read thousands of books to arrive at that result. Your internal world model—a contextual understanding based on a mental model of the world—predicts these consequences for you, and it’s highly efficient.

“V-JEPA is a step toward a more grounded understanding of the world so machines can achieve more generalized reasoning and planning,” says Meta’s VP & Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who proposed the original Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) in 2022. “Our goal is to build advanced machine intelligence that can learn more like humans do, forming internal models of the world around them to learn, adapt, and forge plans efficiently in the service of completing complex tasks.”

Video JEPA in focus

V-JEPA is a non-generative model that learns by predicting missing or masked parts of a video in an abstract representation space. This is similar to how our Image Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (I-JEPA) compares abstract representations of images (rather than comparing the pixels themselves). Unlike generative approaches that try to fill in every missing pixel, V-JEPA has the flexibility to discard unpredictable information, which leads to improved training and sample efficiency by a factor between 1.5x and 6x.

Because it takes a self-supervised learning approach, V-JEPA is pre-trained entirely with unlabeled data. Labels are only used to adapt the model to a particular task after pre-training. This type of architecture proves more efficient than previous models, both in terms of the number of labeled examples needed and the total amount of effort put into learning even the unlabeled data. With V-JEPA, we’ve seen efficiency boosts on both of these fronts.

With V-JEPA, we mask out a large portion of a video so the model is only shown a little bit of the context. We then ask the predictor to fill in the blanks of what’s missing—not in terms of the actual pixels, but rather as a more abstract description in this representation space.

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Masking methodology

V-JEPA wasn’t trained to understand one specific type of action. Instead it used self-supervised training on a range of videos and learned a number of things about how the world works. The team also carefully considered the masking strategy—if you don’t block out large regions of the video and instead randomly sample patches here and there, it makes the task too easy and your model doesn’t learn anything particularly complicated about the world.

It’s also important to note that, in most videos, things evolve somewhat slowly over time. If you mask a portion of the video but only for a specific instant in time and the model can see what came immediately before and/or immediately after, it also makes things too easy and the model almost certainly won’t learn anything interesting. As such, the team used an approach where it masked portions of the video in both space and time, which forces the model to learn and develop an understanding of the scene.

Efficient predictions

Making these predictions in the abstract representation space is important because it allows the model to focus on the higher-level conceptual information of what the video contains without worrying about the kind of details that are most often unimportant for downstream tasks. After all, if a video shows a tree, you’re likely not concerned about the minute movements of each individual leaf.

One of the reasons why we’re excited about this direction is that V-JEPA is the first model for video that’s good at “frozen evaluations,” which means we do all of our self-supervised pre-training on the encoder and the predictor, and then we don’t touch those parts of the model anymore. When we want to adapt them to learn a new skill, we just train a small lightweight specialized layer or a small network on top of that, which is very efficient and quick.

research paper read online

Previous work had to do full fine-tuning, which means that after pre-training your model, when you want the model to get really good at fine-grained action recognition while you’re adapting your model to take on that task, you have to update the parameters or the weights in all of your model. And then that model overall becomes specialized at doing that one task and it’s not going to be good for anything else anymore. If you want to teach the model a different task, you have to use different data, and you have to specialize the entire model for this other task. With V-JEPA, as we’ve demonstrated in this work, we can pre-train the model once without any labeled data, fix that, and then reuse those same parts of the model for several different tasks, like action classification, recognition of fine-grained object interactions, and activity localization.

research paper read online

Avenues for future research...

While the “V” in V-JEPA stands for “video,” it only accounts for the visual content of videos thus far. A more multimodal approach is an obvious next step, so we’re thinking carefully about incorporating audio along with the visuals.

As a proof of concept, the current V-JEPA model excels at fine-grained object interactions and distinguishing detailed object-to-object interactions that happen over time. For example, if the model needs to be able to distinguish between someone putting down a pen, picking up a pen, and pretending to put down a pen but not actually doing it, V-JEPA is quite good compared to previous methods for that high-grade action recognition task. However, those things work on relatively short time scales. If you show V-JEPA a video clip of a few seconds, maybe up to 10 seconds, it’s great for that. So another important step for us is thinking about planning and the model’s ability to make predictions over a longer time horizon.

...and the path toward AMI

To date, our work with V-JEPA has been primarily about perception—understanding the contents of various video streams in order to obtain some context about the world immediately surrounding us. The predictor in this Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture serves as an early physical world model: You don’t have to see everything that’s happening in the frame, and it can tell you conceptually what’s happening there. As a next step, we want to show how we can use this kind of a predictor or world model for planning or sequential decision-making.

We know that it’s possible to train JEPA models on video data without requiring strong supervision and that they can watch videos in the way an infant might—just observing the world passively, learning a lot of interesting things about how to understand the context of those videos in such a way that, with a small amount of labeled data, you can quickly acquire a new task and ability to recognize different actions.

V-JEPA is a research model, and we’re exploring a number of future applications. For example, we expect that the context V-JEPA provides could be useful for our embodied AI work as well as our work to build a contextual AI assistant for future AR glasses. We firmly believe in the value of responsible open science, and that’s why we’re releasing the V-JEPA model under the CC BY-NC license so other researchers can extend this work.

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Writing a Research Paper Introduction | Step-by-Step Guide

Published on September 24, 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on March 27, 2023.

Writing a Research Paper Introduction

The introduction to a research paper is where you set up your topic and approach for the reader. It has several key goals:

  • Present your topic and get the reader interested
  • Provide background or summarize existing research
  • Position your own approach
  • Detail your specific research problem and problem statement
  • Give an overview of the paper’s structure

The introduction looks slightly different depending on whether your paper presents the results of original empirical research or constructs an argument by engaging with a variety of sources.

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Table of contents

Step 1: introduce your topic, step 2: describe the background, step 3: establish your research problem, step 4: specify your objective(s), step 5: map out your paper, research paper introduction examples, frequently asked questions about the research paper introduction.

The first job of the introduction is to tell the reader what your topic is and why it’s interesting or important. This is generally accomplished with a strong opening hook.

The hook is a striking opening sentence that clearly conveys the relevance of your topic. Think of an interesting fact or statistic, a strong statement, a question, or a brief anecdote that will get the reader wondering about your topic.

For example, the following could be an effective hook for an argumentative paper about the environmental impact of cattle farming:

A more empirical paper investigating the relationship of Instagram use with body image issues in adolescent girls might use the following hook:

Don’t feel that your hook necessarily has to be deeply impressive or creative. Clarity and relevance are still more important than catchiness. The key thing is to guide the reader into your topic and situate your ideas.

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This part of the introduction differs depending on what approach your paper is taking.

In a more argumentative paper, you’ll explore some general background here. In a more empirical paper, this is the place to review previous research and establish how yours fits in.

Argumentative paper: Background information

After you’ve caught your reader’s attention, specify a bit more, providing context and narrowing down your topic.

Provide only the most relevant background information. The introduction isn’t the place to get too in-depth; if more background is essential to your paper, it can appear in the body .

Empirical paper: Describing previous research

For a paper describing original research, you’ll instead provide an overview of the most relevant research that has already been conducted. This is a sort of miniature literature review —a sketch of the current state of research into your topic, boiled down to a few sentences.

This should be informed by genuine engagement with the literature. Your search can be less extensive than in a full literature review, but a clear sense of the relevant research is crucial to inform your own work.

Begin by establishing the kinds of research that have been done, and end with limitations or gaps in the research that you intend to respond to.

The next step is to clarify how your own research fits in and what problem it addresses.

Argumentative paper: Emphasize importance

In an argumentative research paper, you can simply state the problem you intend to discuss, and what is original or important about your argument.

Empirical paper: Relate to the literature

In an empirical research paper, try to lead into the problem on the basis of your discussion of the literature. Think in terms of these questions:

  • What research gap is your work intended to fill?
  • What limitations in previous work does it address?
  • What contribution to knowledge does it make?

You can make the connection between your problem and the existing research using phrases like the following.

Now you’ll get into the specifics of what you intend to find out or express in your research paper.

The way you frame your research objectives varies. An argumentative paper presents a thesis statement, while an empirical paper generally poses a research question (sometimes with a hypothesis as to the answer).

Argumentative paper: Thesis statement

The thesis statement expresses the position that the rest of the paper will present evidence and arguments for. It can be presented in one or two sentences, and should state your position clearly and directly, without providing specific arguments for it at this point.

Empirical paper: Research question and hypothesis

The research question is the question you want to answer in an empirical research paper.

Present your research question clearly and directly, with a minimum of discussion at this point. The rest of the paper will be taken up with discussing and investigating this question; here you just need to express it.

A research question can be framed either directly or indirectly.

  • This study set out to answer the following question: What effects does daily use of Instagram have on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls?
  • We investigated the effects of daily Instagram use on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls.

If your research involved testing hypotheses , these should be stated along with your research question. They are usually presented in the past tense, since the hypothesis will already have been tested by the time you are writing up your paper.

For example, the following hypothesis might respond to the research question above:

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The final part of the introduction is often dedicated to a brief overview of the rest of the paper.

In a paper structured using the standard scientific “introduction, methods, results, discussion” format, this isn’t always necessary. But if your paper is structured in a less predictable way, it’s important to describe the shape of it for the reader.

If included, the overview should be concise, direct, and written in the present tense.

  • This paper will first discuss several examples of survey-based research into adolescent social media use, then will go on to …
  • This paper first discusses several examples of survey-based research into adolescent social media use, then goes on to …

Full examples of research paper introductions are shown in the tabs below: one for an argumentative paper, the other for an empirical paper.

  • Argumentative paper
  • Empirical paper

Are cows responsible for climate change? A recent study (RIVM, 2019) shows that cattle farmers account for two thirds of agricultural nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands. These emissions result from nitrogen in manure, which can degrade into ammonia and enter the atmosphere. The study’s calculations show that agriculture is the main source of nitrogen pollution, accounting for 46% of the country’s total emissions. By comparison, road traffic and households are responsible for 6.1% each, the industrial sector for 1%. While efforts are being made to mitigate these emissions, policymakers are reluctant to reckon with the scale of the problem. The approach presented here is a radical one, but commensurate with the issue. This paper argues that the Dutch government must stimulate and subsidize livestock farmers, especially cattle farmers, to transition to sustainable vegetable farming. It first establishes the inadequacy of current mitigation measures, then discusses the various advantages of the results proposed, and finally addresses potential objections to the plan on economic grounds.

The rise of social media has been accompanied by a sharp increase in the prevalence of body image issues among women and girls. This correlation has received significant academic attention: Various empirical studies have been conducted into Facebook usage among adolescent girls (Tiggermann & Slater, 2013; Meier & Gray, 2014). These studies have consistently found that the visual and interactive aspects of the platform have the greatest influence on body image issues. Despite this, highly visual social media (HVSM) such as Instagram have yet to be robustly researched. This paper sets out to address this research gap. We investigated the effects of daily Instagram use on the prevalence of body image issues among adolescent girls. It was hypothesized that daily Instagram use would be associated with an increase in body image concerns and a decrease in self-esteem ratings.

The introduction of a research paper includes several key elements:

  • A hook to catch the reader’s interest
  • Relevant background on the topic
  • Details of your research problem

and your problem statement

  • A thesis statement or research question
  • Sometimes an overview of the paper

Don’t feel that you have to write the introduction first. The introduction is often one of the last parts of the research paper you’ll write, along with the conclusion.

This is because it can be easier to introduce your paper once you’ve already written the body ; you may not have the clearest idea of your arguments until you’ve written them, and things can change during the writing process .

The way you present your research problem in your introduction varies depending on the nature of your research paper . A research paper that presents a sustained argument will usually encapsulate this argument in a thesis statement .

A research paper designed to present the results of empirical research tends to present a research question that it seeks to answer. It may also include a hypothesis —a prediction that will be confirmed or disproved by your research.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, March 27). Writing a Research Paper Introduction | Step-by-Step Guide. Scribbr. Retrieved February 24, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/research-paper-introduction/

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Gemma: Introducing new state-of-the-art open models

Feb 21, 2024

Gemma is built for responsible AI development from the same research and technology used to create Gemini models.

The word “Gemma” and a spark icon with blueprint styling appears in a blue gradient against a black background.

At Google, we believe in making AI helpful for everyone . We have a long history of contributing innovations to the open community, such as with Transformers , TensorFlow , BERT , T5 , JAX , AlphaFold , and AlphaCode . Today, we’re excited to introduce a new generation of open models from Google to assist developers and researchers in building AI responsibly.

Gemma open models

Gemma is a family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models. Developed by Google DeepMind and other teams across Google, Gemma is inspired by Gemini, and the name reflects the Latin gemma , meaning “precious stone.” Accompanying our model weights, we’re also releasing tools to support developer innovation, foster collaboration, and guide responsible use of Gemma models.

Gemma is available worldwide, starting today. Here are the key details to know:

  • We’re releasing model weights in two sizes: Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B . Each size is released with pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants.
  • A new Responsible Generative AI Toolkit provides guidance and essential tools for creating safer AI applications with Gemma.
  • We’re providing toolchains for inference and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) across all major frameworks: JAX, PyTorch, and TensorFlow through native Keras 3.0 .
  • Ready-to-use Colab and Kaggle notebooks , alongside integration with popular tools such as Hugging Face , MaxText , NVIDIA NeMo and TensorRT-LLM , make it easy to get started with Gemma.
  • Pre-trained and instruction-tuned Gemma models can run on your laptop, workstation, or Google Cloud with easy deployment on Vertex AI and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
  • Optimization across multiple AI hardware platforms ensures industry-leading performance, including NVIDIA GPUs and Google Cloud TPUs .
  • Terms of use permit responsible commercial usage and distribution for all organizations, regardless of size.

State-of-the-art performance at size

Gemma models share technical and infrastructure components with Gemini , our largest and most capable AI model widely available today. This enables Gemma 2B and 7B to achieve best-in-class performance for their sizes compared to other open models. And Gemma models are capable of running directly on a developer laptop or desktop computer. Notably, Gemma surpasses significantly larger models on key benchmarks while adhering to our rigorous standards for safe and responsible outputs. See the technical report for details on performance, dataset composition, and modeling methodologies.

A chart showing Gemma performance on common benchmarks, compared to Llama-2 7B and 13B

Responsible by design

Gemma is designed with our AI Principles at the forefront. As part of making Gemma pre-trained models safe and reliable, we used automated techniques to filter out certain personal information and other sensitive data from training sets. Additionally, we used extensive fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align our instruction-tuned models with responsible behaviors. To understand and reduce the risk profile for Gemma models, we conducted robust evaluations including manual red-teaming, automated adversarial testing, and assessments of model capabilities for dangerous activities. These evaluations are outlined in our Model Card . 1

We’re also releasing a new Responsible Generative AI Toolkit together with Gemma to help developers and researchers prioritize building safe and responsible AI applications. The toolkit includes:

  • Safety classification: We provide a novel methodology for building robust safety classifiers with minimal examples.
  • Debugging: A model debugging tool helps you investigate Gemma's behavior and address potential issues.
  • Guidance: You can access best practices for model builders based on Google’s experience in developing and deploying large language models.

Optimized across frameworks, tools and hardware

You can fine-tune Gemma models on your own data to adapt to specific application needs, such as summarization or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Gemma supports a wide variety of tools and systems:

  • Multi-framework tools: Bring your favorite framework, with reference implementations for inference and fine-tuning across multi-framework Keras 3.0, native PyTorch, JAX, and Hugging Face Transformers.
  • Cross-device compatibility: Gemma models run across popular device types, including laptop, desktop, IoT, mobile and cloud, enabling broadly accessible AI capabilities.
  • Cutting-edge hardware platforms: We’ve partnered with NVIDIA to optimize Gemma for NVIDIA GPUs , from data center to the cloud to local RTX AI PCs, ensuring industry-leading performance and integration with cutting-edge technology.
  • Optimized for Google Cloud: Vertex AI provides a broad MLOps toolset with a range of tuning options and one-click deployment using built-in inference optimizations. Advanced customization is available with fully-managed Vertex AI tools or with self-managed GKE, including deployment to cost-efficient infrastructure across GPU, TPU, and CPU from either platform.

Free credits for research and development

Gemma is built for the open community of developers and researchers powering AI innovation. You can start working with Gemma today using free access in Kaggle, a free tier for Colab notebooks, and $300 in credits for first-time Google Cloud users. Researchers can also apply for Google Cloud credits of up to $500,000 to accelerate their projects.

Getting started

You can explore more about Gemma and access quickstart guides on ai.google.dev/gemma .

As we continue to expand the Gemma model family, we look forward to introducing new variants for diverse applications. Stay tuned for events and opportunities in the coming weeks to connect, learn and build with Gemma.

We’re excited to see what you create!

More Information

Google adheres to rigorous data filtering practices to ensure fair evaluation. Our models exclude benchmark data from training sets, ensuring the integrity of benchmark comparisons.

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  28. Writing a Research Paper Introduction

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