Hi everyone. Is there a good source for peer reviewed medical studies, available to laypeople without subscriptions to medical journals? I’d like to spend some time in my off season deep-diving into some notions I have floating around in my head, but I’m not sure where the best resource is for peer reviewed work.
Thanks!
The guys always cite Pubmed as their source for most studies. Abstracts on there, dont think its free for the full study usually. Best to make friends with someone who has a university login or just find the study you want and ask on a friendly forum, theres usually soneone with access that would help you out.
search for “where is sci hub now” and you can access almost everything
If you’re in Spokane, send me a PM, I may be able to help with specific titles.
I just Google whatever I’m looking for with pubmed out front and I usually get what I’m looking for.
As an academic this is a FAQ with several options! Just put the title in google and add “filetype:pdf” and you often get lucky with some repository. Or try pubmedcentral; thats the full text version of pubmed. Or try https://unpaywall.org/ which has a browser extension which will look for the free PDF for you. bw alex
Often times if you message the corresponding author through research gate ( https://www.researchgate.net/ ) they will share the paper with. Or they may even have it there readily available to read.
You could also email the corresponding author directly.
Thank you Tom, I’ll keep that in mind!
Google Scholar …and the be very very very careful about studies (especially just reading an abstract). Many, if not most are junk, not powered sufficiently, or outright lies. Journals (and the articles they publish are ranked (impact factor) - Journal ranking - Wikipedia, and reading the abstract alone is a great way to get lost in crap that isn’t scientifically accurate. I was in charge of our residency journal club for 6 years (critically reading journal articles and deciding if they should change practice), and I can tell you the vast vast vast majority of publication isn’t worth a change in your practice. You 99% of the time need to see table 1, and know how to interpret.
The aim of scientists is to have their articles published in scientific journals, especially scientific journals of high repute. That means most of them are not freely available. Some journals allow the authors to pay so that their article is freely available. (Scientific publishing is really weird, the authors all work for free, as do the reviewers. Reviewers don’t get any credit for their work. And authors will often have to pay extra for e. g. color figures. Then the journals charge scientific institutions for subscriptions. So it may happen that authors lose access to their own articles.)
If you want to search for scientific articles, I recommend either Google Scholar or Pub Med.
+1
I have had occasion in my professional life to require citation to journal articles. Many academics are happy to both send you their work and discuss it. They don’t see a dime from paid subscriptions to publishers.
As others have said, I recommend to use pubmed to find a study you are interested in (I use it daily for work).
It can be difficult to navigate so have a look at sites that teach you how to best use the search function.
Once you something that looks interesting, copy and paste the study title and put it into google. Most times you will be able to find an open access source.
More and more papers are accessible these days without an institutional login. Of course, just because it’s published doesn’t mean it’s a good study and many journals do not publish negative findings so information out there can be misleading. In fact sponsored studies that show favourable results are often very easy to find 
As mentioned above, be careful when drawing inference from scientific papers. Any study is only as good as the reader doing the critical appraisal. Many studies that are peer reviewed have significant flaws in study design. Statistics can be used to manipulate data to get it to say what you want it to say.
If you don’t have a background in research, before you start looking at journals, I’d suggest doing some work on critical appraisal.
Really good information, thanks all. I should mention my ‘Research’ is purely pedestrian and more just a way to fill my time in a more edifying way than coveting bikeporn on Instagram. Thank you for pointing me in the tight direction!
Check you a knowledgeable librarian at your local or state library. You may be able to get pubmed access through it. If you have s public university w a med school they will have access. As the public you should be able to access their pubmed.