Where do I look for recent publications on a topic I am doing an independant research in?
I am researching on a Pharmacogenetic profiling in various genetic diseases. I have no access to any reasearch institute’s library or am not in any university at present. I might find some on the net websites how do I get a membership in them because most of them ask for a university of institute related email to register
Also how long do these research publication sites allow access if you register once?
Thanks…
sorry typo *independent
Thanks Geoff for the Public Library of Science (PLoS) website I had no idea the other websites that ask for money to register costed so much…!! 
I have also always asked my old professor for access to these articles or used the library computer during my undergrad.
I would suggest that your basic first-stop shop should be Google Scholar to search for your articles. Although in most cases you won’t be able to access the full text of the article, if the full text is available for free online, Google Scholar will usually provide the link.
Next you might want to try searching on PubMed Central. This is a database maintained by the National Institutes of Health, which recently mandated that all publications on research funded with NIH money (which is most biomedical research in the US!) must be made freely available on PubMed Central within 1 year after publication. So this is a potentially good source for articles.
After that, you might start looking at specific sites that offer free access to scientific journal articles. For example, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) publishes several journals, including journals on medicine and genetics, which are "open-access" journals, meaning that as soon as an article is published, it is made freely available to the public on the website. You could try sites such as this and see if you can uncover anything.
I’ve never tried to individually sign up for access to scientific journals without going through a university, so I can’t say much about that, but from what I understand, it’s pretty expensive. Oftentimes a journal will sell access to individual articles, which might be good if you’ve read the abstract and are fairly sure the article is going to be relevant to your research, but even this is pretty expensive, I think typically around $10 per article.
December 20th, 2009 at 10:45 am
I would suggest that your basic first-stop shop should be Google Scholar to search for your articles. Although in most cases you won’t be able to access the full text of the article, if the full text is available for free online, Google Scholar will usually provide the link.
Next you might want to try searching on PubMed Central. This is a database maintained by the National Institutes of Health, which recently mandated that all publications on research funded with NIH money (which is most biomedical research in the US!) must be made freely available on PubMed Central within 1 year after publication. So this is a potentially good source for articles.
After that, you might start looking at specific sites that offer free access to scientific journal articles. For example, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) publishes several journals, including journals on medicine and genetics, which are "open-access" journals, meaning that as soon as an article is published, it is made freely available to the public on the website. You could try sites such as this and see if you can uncover anything.
I’ve never tried to individually sign up for access to scientific journals without going through a university, so I can’t say much about that, but from what I understand, it’s pretty expensive. Oftentimes a journal will sell access to individual articles, which might be good if you’ve read the abstract and are fairly sure the article is going to be relevant to your research, but even this is pretty expensive, I think typically around $10 per article.
References :
http://scholar.google.com
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov
http://www.plos.org