Disclaimer: the responsibility for your actions is solely yours. Leeching academic papers is a punishable crime.

Doing research in a small and poor country is quite a challenge. For the most part, it is not having access to relevant literature, software and not having proper infrastructure that restricts one’s chances for improving their papers. Factors such as terrible work ethic, lack of recognition for researchers and analysts in public life (and for that matter, negative attitude towards them), as well as not having a well established research industry (having little or no funding, not having any standards and not offering any reward, spiritual nor material) resemble additional perils that make our lives miserable.

In this entry however, my aim is to provide several important ideas for overcoming the lack of access to books, journals and publications. Most of this might be already known to many, yet, I assume that it is useful to have it written somewhere.

1. The Internet is your weapon. Make absolutely sure to exploit it in every way possible. Use several search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc) to look for what you need; browse through torrents and peer-to-peer networks and through sharing websites (Rapidshare, Megaupload, Fileserve, Mediafire etc). Seek resources where you usually wouldn’t do it – presentations on SlideShare and lectures on YouTube and Vimeo.

2. While you should make sure that you use all of the above, don’t forget that Google is the supreme one. When you Google, therefore, make sure you do it thoroughly. If you have a Google account, make sure to search one more time after you log out (the creepy side of it is that it often alters your results according to your browsing history and personal history record). Use advanced search and use tricks such as putting the exact phrase you are looking for in quotation marks (for instance “rule of law”). If you are looking for a particular title or author, write the title in quotation marks and add .pdf or Rapidshare, Megaupload etc(for instance “Will Kymlicka” .pdf or “Will Kymlicka” rapidshare). Be prepared to get many false clues and sometimes not to find the exact thing you are looking for (although you will find many other useful things down the road).

3. Scribd and Library.nu are the most precious repositories of PDFs. You can spend hours on them and download more literature than you can read in a lifetime. Yet, you need to register (it’s free) in order to use them. On Scribd you are required to share in order to be able to download. This makes perfect sense to me – you should share your library with others even if it is not mandatory.

4. In your free time, download collections of books via torrents. You can look for University Presses collections and then get hundreds of good books on your hard drive and later on pick the ones you want to keep, and delete the rest. You can download whole bibliographies of individual authors (as well as tributes, critiques, reflections on their work etc). You can also look for whole bibliographical lists for certain courses.

5. Ask your friends to help. If you have friends who study or work in an institution that has access to online libraries, make sure that you ask them to download articles for you. You can facilitate the exchanges through mailing lists or social media; of course, make sure to return the favor one day. And when you get in such a privileged position, don’t forget how you used to feel, and help whoever asks you to. Knowledge is to be shared and reproduced even when you personally have no direct benefit from that.