How to access academic research when you’re not affiliated with a university

I often hear practitioners lamenting the fact that (a) academic research is difficult to access, and (b) even when one manages to gain access to a research article, the research itself can be difficult to understand. This is very unfortunate because I strongly believe that academic research has a lot to offer practitioners. Further, all the researchers of recruitment and selection that I know personally are genuinely passionate about learning how to perform these two vital HR functions as effectively as possible. I know these researchers would all be delighted to know that their research is being consulted or used by practitioners!

Research Access

So, how does one gain access to academic research? The sad truth is that much of our published research is indeed hidden behind ‘pay walls’. Without wanting to get into this topic too much, please be aware that there is a currently a very active movement among many academics to push for a transition away from pay-wall journals to those which offer open access. But, in the meantime, there are some ways around the pay-wall problem, and I want to share a few of these.

1.      Open access journals. The Journal of Personnel Assessment and Decisions is the official journal of the International Personnel Assessment Council, and it is fully open access. You can access all articles for free. The editorial team is a group of heavy-hitters in the selection and assessment space, and a browse through the volumes shows many articles on the topics of selection, candidate experience, technology in assessments, and reducing discrimination. To see the content, on the left-hand side of the website there is a “Browse” button:

2.      Open access articles within traditional journals. A little-known fact is that many traditional journals now give authors the option of paying a fee to grant open access to their papers. Usually these articles are branded with an unlock padlock icon and the term Open access or Free access. Here is an example of an open access article about interview anxiety (and who cannot relate to that topic?) by Leann Schneider, Deborah Powell, and Silvia Bonaccio published in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment.

3.      Pre-prints. Most journals will allow the authors of academic papers to host ‘pre-print’ versions of their articles on web sites. The exact definition of a pre-print is a bit unclear, but in many cases, you can think of a pre-print as the ‘final version’ of manuscript before it was accepted and transformed into a nice journal layout. In other words, a pre-print is often as good as the final product! Getting access to pre-prints can be tricky because not all academics are proactive in posting them but some good avenues include the websites ResearchGate (www.researchgate.net) and Academia.edu (www.academia.edu). My advice is to sign up to those websites, and ‘follow’ academics that you like. Other places to get pre-prints include university publication repositories (Google the academic’s name and their affiliation) and pre-print servers such as https://psyarxiv.com/. Sometimes even a basic Google search for an article’s title will take you to the article itself.

 4.      ‘Follow’ your favourite academics. Many academics have social media presences, with LinkedIn, Twitter, and ResearchGate being among the most popular. Most academics are very happy for others to connect with them; in fact, social media can be one of the most effective ways to share one’s research. (ProTip: If you’re keen to connect on LinkedIn, don’t just use the standard LinkedIn introduction, but instead make a small effort to explain who you are and why you’re interested in connecting. E.g., “Hi Patrick, I work in recruitment and selection and I’m connecting with you because I am keen to learn more about your research.”)

 5.      Subscribe to journal alerts. Most reputable publishers will allow you to create a free account with them, which will then allow you to subscribe to email alerts when new research is published. If you are interested particularly in recruitment, assessment, and selection, I can recommend the following journals as places to start. I’ve listed the journals in an order that roughly corresponds to the proportion of research that is on these topics:

• International Journal of Selection and Assessment
• The Journal of Personnel Assessment and Decisions
• Personnel Psychology
• Journal of Applied Psychology
• Journal of Personnel Psychology
• European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

I want to be clear: This list is not exhaustive, and is intended just to give you a place to start (and were just what popped into my head this afternoon!). If a reader would like to add a journal to the list here, please comment to this effect so others are aware!

6.      Contact the authors directly. Almost every article will have a ‘corresponding author’ listed. Academics are usually permitted by the publishers to share their work with others for personal use, and this would include personal requests for a copy. Most academics I know are truly delighted when somebody is interested in their research and so don’t be shy about contacting us; you might even make our day! But please be patient with us because we do receive a lot of mail. If you don’t hear back after a week, it is totally fine to follow up with a polite reminder!

7.      Listen to Podcasts. There are now a good number of podcasts in the recruitment and selection space, and Industrial and Organisational Psychology more broadly (which is likely to be of interest to many people in HR). Many of these will include interviews with academics and innovators. My personal favourites are:

Science4Hire by Charles Handler (a podcast all about selection, assessment, and the candidate experience)

Department 12 by Ben Butina (check out his 4 minute spiel on this topic! – September 5, 2019)

Mind your Work by Jose Espinoza and Nick Bremner

Mind on the job by Ben Searle

Summary: The key point is to not give up. Academics generally are not happy about how difficult it is to share their research so get in touch with them!

Research Translation

Very few academics would argue that academic research is easily digestible to non-academics. You have to think of journal articles as our way of having conversations with each other; in fact journals are kind of social media for academics, before there was social media. Often our discussions need to get quite technical and the unfortunate side effect of this is that they can be hard to read or understand without formal training or experience in certain areas.

These days, many journals ask academics to draft ‘key takeaways’ from their research, and the takeaways will be published along with the article. 

Other journals like to take a blogging approach to research translation. For example, last year, I published a paper with Clark Amistad, Ryan Ng, Jeromy Anglim, and Ray Fells in the European Journal of Personality. In that paper, we looked at how the personalities of two negotiators can interact to affect the negotiators’ outcomes. Following its publication, in what was a really fun experience for me, the journal invited me for an interview, which was later published on their blog here: https://www.ejp-blog.com/blog/2018/12/12/press-release-hexaco-negotiations

Summary: The key takeaway here is that us academics are doing better than we used to at translating our research so it can be used by practitioners and the general public. We still have a long way to go, but again, don’t be afraid to ask questions. You can ask your questions on social media, or you can write to us directly!