Great Access to Scholarly Articles

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Many launch their research by reading journal articles. Scholarly pieces can offer insight into a new area, identify seminal cases or issues, or provide much needed analysis. I rely on a few quality sites for full-text articles. One worth bookmarking is the Social Science Research Network. A significant portion of their full text articles are free to download. Users must register, but that is also free. There are several categories (networks) including accounting, economics, social/environmental, financial and marketing. The Legal Scholarship Network “distributes quality research related to law, economics, and business in 61 different subject areas.” Labor, Environmental, Tort law, and Tax are just a few of the practice areas covered. The searcher has a couple to options when trying to locate articles of interest. Select the “Search” option from the menu. The site supports general keyword queries or searches by author, journal, topic, or by the SSRN’s classification system. Choose an article and the site will provide an abstract, citation information, and download statistics. Select the “go to download document” to download the .PDF or have it emailed. The site’s “briefcase” feature allows the searcher to store articles.