<p>I am an undergraduate looking to do research. Where can I find “common” publications available to the public? Must I always subscribe to xyz publisher to read the papers published there or is there somewhere like a “wikipedia” of research papers available?</p>
<p>Your institution should subscribe to many journals – check your university library’s website for access to electronic journals.</p>
<p>In the biological sciences, you can look at [PubMed</a> Central](<a href=“http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/]PubMed”>Home - PMC - NCBI). There may be similar resources in other fields.</p>
<p>Thanks. I forgot to mention that I was ECE/CS/Math; any of these topics with “wikipedia” of research papers is greatly appreciated. I’ll check out the section on my college too.</p>
<p>Update: holy crap. It looks like there are thousands of research PUBLICATIONS … is there a list of top publications?</p>
<p>Hey, for CS/Math ArXiv.org is a very good resource. You can click yourself through areas you find interesting and just read papers you like. However, many research papers are written on a rather high level, and you may want to look for so called review articles that do not present new research themselves, but rather summarize the latest development about a topic. Then, all articles refer to dozens of other articles, and so you can read yourself through the literature.</p>
<p>Google has with scholar.google.com a service dedicated to find research articles, and isiknowledge.com also has a rather nice data base.</p>