Research Guide: Finding Resources

Thought this might be useful, but I'd like to share some tips and resources that helped me through high school and college.

How to Access Academic Articles without Paying Publishers
I'm sure you're aware by now, some articles or studies are hidden behind paywalls.
If you need to access these documents for research - always remember that these paywalls never benefit the actual author as publishers take a large percentage of the profit.

What I learned is that if you reach out to these authors via email letting them know you're a student, specifying what article you need and what you're gonna use it for - they will likely send you their copy of the article free of charge.

Alternative Site for Bibliography Annotations
If you're a student, bibliographies become a normal part of your routine. And I'm sure you're aware that the most common sites professors/teachers will refer are littered with ads and often limit you on how many citations you can generate at a time, so I'd like to share a resource I found that allows you to create free annotations - requiring no account to use.

https://www.mybib.com/
Mybib is completely free, ad free - requires no account or sign-in and lets you create unlimited citations with no restrictions.

Best Place to Find Articles
Finding reliable sources of information is difficult in these past few years, especially with the rise of AI slop burying human generated content.
So I'd like to draw attention to a few databases that I hope more people will choose to rely on more.

https://scholar.google.com/
Google scholar is a global database dedicated to providing a search engine specifically for studies.

https://archive.org/
The Internet archive is a community project dedicated to the preservation of digital media, it is a great tool for finding historical references on the internet that has been lost to time.

Autocorrect and Essay Tool
English is a hard language to learn and sometimes write for, and existing autocorrect and dictionary tools are outdated and not very useful.
One tool that helped me through school was Grammarly, a free browser add-on available on all platforms.

Grammarly while it uses AI, it is not generative and will not write content for you - instead it will suggest edits based on what you've written.
Its dictionary is based on the Internet and user input and will update the more you use it.
While Grammarly is free to use, it does offer an optional premium subscription giving you access to more advanced tools (but is completely optional).

https://www.grammarly.com/