Where can I find (old) scientific articles (and books)?

Question

Often when reading books I find references to old studies, essays and articles that I would like to take a closer look at. Now, the problem is, how do I find them?

Popular and semi-popular books can often be found on Amazon or other book stores, but what about that out-of-print book from 1945, or the classic study on ... published in an internal journal in 1957?

I have tried searching the online library resources of Norwegian universities, and they do have some of the publications I'm looking for, but ideally I would like to own a copy.

Are there any (searchable) online resources to locate such material?

Update

Now I have tried the various resources suggested in the answers, and I did indeed find some useful stuff. However, the book(s) I'm looking for are apparently out of print. Even if a book is listed on many different sites, none of them actually have it, since it's out of print from the publisher. Maybe I have to go to the library as a last resort...

For articles, PDF files are fine, but for books I would like to have the real thing (ideally).

Answer 1

I use Abe Books, and like it a lot. It aggregates a lot of second-hand online shops, so you just need to pay attention to who the seller is to keep down shipping costs.

Answer 2

I often search for articles from the field of Operations Research. All the journals have been now scanned to PDFs by the publishers, but they are not free to access. I would suspect this would be the case in all the other fields of study.

Have you tried http://www.sciencedirect.com/ ? Similarly Elsevier, JSTOR etc.

The only problem as I mentioned earlier would be that you need to pay for these articles.

The other common method is to email the authors to send you a copy, to which they will most ofter reply yes. (hoping to get a citation by you or out of goodwill). This hardly applies for the old articles from the middle of last century.

My own experience of searching through the articles from the 1960s is that the the knowledge there has been already distilled to all their successor and I have rarely found anything of value other than the nice feeling, that this is the first article on this subject.

As a last note. I have quite a large collection of articles on Travelling Salesman problem, Vehicle Routing problem and some location analysis problems. Send me an email if you wish to enquire on some.

Answer 3

Your best bets for online resources are Google Scholar, Google Book Search and regular Google. They also index many of the paywalled archives of the publishers.

Many university libraries will scan (parts of) books to PDF for you on request. This is allowed by copyright law if it's for educational purposes. If a book is not available from your local university library they usually offer to forward your request to another library that does have it.

Or you could try to contact the author or publisher. They may have a few copies left, or they may know where else you can find it.

Answer 4

CiteSeer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu is an invaluable resource for old articles.

Answer 5

One place i've noticed a lot of old scientific books is in a study rooms at a colleges & universities, sometimes there's bookshelves full of books that are there for the taking. no longer used for any classes but still some good reading.

Answer 6

Google Scholar is THE resource for scientific papers as pointed by @palm3D. You can filter you results by date to find very old or recent publications. For example: search for "programming" and restrict you result for papers betwenn 1960 and 1970. You will get this classic paper by Richard Bellman about Dinamyc Programming published in 1966.

Google Scholar have some other couple advantages:

• It sort the results based on the relevancy of the article, that includes how many times it was cited in other publications or books. In addition you can browse resources that cited that paper.
• It links different resources where you can find the copy of the paper. So, if you're not in a university, you can find unprotected copies of the article, often in the author's home page.