As a student, you may have access to great resources through your school’s library (definitely check there first, especially for papers). If not, a lot of textbooks, papers, and resources can be found online for free. Here are some websites to check.*
*Note that downloading from the web does sometimes carry risks. Don’t click on any pop-ups or links with your PDF download should they appear.
Directory of Open Access Books
Project Gutenberg (mostly not textbooks)
Standard eBooks (mostly not textbooks)
Mobilism ebook sharing forum
Lens is a free database search which links to original articles.
Web of Science is a database search that has access to different databases depending on location and institution access.
Google Scholar is a scholarly search engine. Note that searches are affected by search history. Sometimes it has links to pdfs.
Research Gate is a research community website which is searchable and sometimes a good place to reach out to authors from to ask for access to their paper if you can’t access it otherwise.
Paper Panda is a Chrome extension that finds pdfs of papers you’re looking at an abstract of already.
Research Rabbit and Connected Papers both create a web of papers that are connected by citations, authors, or keywords. Generally start with a paper of interest and go from there, but also searchable with keywords. Provide links and free pdfs when available.
Consensus, Elicit, and Perplexity are search tools which allow full sentence/question searches and provide a text summary as well as articles that match your search and links to pdfs.
STORM and Co-STORM from Stanford are large language model-based tools that generate a wikipedia-like report about a topic that you ask a question about. They use feedback between AIs in a conversation taking on different perspectives within a topic, which in Co-STORM you can contribute to by asking follow up questions or commenting to generate a well-rounded report.
Directory of Open Access Journals
If you’re not using a tool that supports natural language (AI tools), there are specific ways to search