You know all the details of the paper already

Step 1: Try google scholar

<aside> 📌

Link to google scholar

</aside>

Let’s imagine that I want to find the .pdf of the following paper:

Park, C. W. (1982). Joint decisions in home purchasing: A muddling-through process. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(2), 151-162.

Paste the title of the paper in quotation marks into google scholar (quotation marks tell Google that you want these exact words in this exact order)

Google gives you a .pdf

In the search results, I see this! The paper! Yay!

image.png

Click on the [pdf] link on the right side to be taken to the pdf of the paper where you can download the citation and put it into your reference manager

Google gives you an HTML

For other papers, you might not have the option to go right to a pdf, but it will send you to an html page instead. See example below:

image.png

Once you click on the [html] link, you should (hopefully) be able to find a place to download the pdf from the following link. If you cannot download the .pdf from the webpage, proceed to Step 2.

image.png

Google gives you nothing

In some cases, Google will give you neither an html nor a pdf. It would look something like this if you’re on hec wifi, or have no righthand links at all if you’re at home