Hey Docs,
Your content, in particular your forums and blogs have lit the proverbial fire in me to question more, read more and learn more. I’ve found myself on NCBI (PubMed) scrolling through abstracts and searching for everything under the sun just to soak it all in…
Do you guys have recommendations on resource dumps/sites that hold “the literature” en masse so that the overly curious can be sure what they are reading is legit and/or worth while?
Thanks as always.
There aren’t really any resources like that (that are legal, at least). Either you have some sort of institutional access via a university library, or you use something like Sci-Hub or Reddit - Dive into anything .
Apeman,
In general, all publications (and in some cases raw data) from US federally funded research must be available to the tax payer in one form or another (usually the “accepted” form by the journal i.e. a version of the manuscript not under copyright claim by the journal). That being said it may not be easy to find it.
In doing a quick search through National Institute of Health (NIH was the closest thing I could think of off the top of my head for squishy sciences) funded work it seems like folks are required to have it on here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ .
I am not familiar with who funds the type of research Barbell Medicine reads up on nor really how pub med works. Always in a manuscript one has to write in the acknowledgements what agency founded the work. Most journal websites give away the acknowledgements sections away for free. So go to the journal website and find the actual research article to see what the website gives away for free. Hopefully the full article but if not then things like the acknowledgements and author affiliation. A lot of the top tier journals are moving towards open science anyways so you could be lucky and able to read it for free. A caveat is sometimes you can only read the research article for free if it is linked from a writeup on the published work. For instance, the New York Times writes about the latest and greatest in Science or Nature and give the link to it then you’d get to read it for free.
If all else fails you could track down those doing the research, find their email (institutional website), and write to them with a sincere email (try to not make it sound like a robot as popular articles get robo spam) saying you’re interested in their work, not currently affiliated with a university, and ask if they can share an open source copy of the manuscript.
In physics we post all preprints to research articles to arXiv.org. In looking around people tried to have that same sort of resource for the life sciences with bioRxiv.org (wikipedia: bioRxiv - Wikipedia ) but the link isn’t working for me so perhaps it is no longer supported.
As Austin mentioned, most university libraries will have subscriptions to the journals you’re interested in so if you live near a public university you can looking into going there and looking up the articles. Also, some universities offer library privileges to alumni so you could also look into that.
Eric
Thanks to you both!
Look within.