research paper free reddit

May 30, 2023

Websites for pirated research papers, during my research, i found various reddit discussions that addressed the issue of accessing pirated research papers and alternative methods to find them. there was a general consensus among reddit users that websites like sci-hub, researchgate, and arxiv.org provide access to research papers for free, although some users cautioned against using sci-hub due to ethical and legal concerns . users also suggested alternative methods like using open access button, reaching out to authors directly, and searching for papers on authors' research group websites . overall, the sources were quite related to the original query, and my uncertainty is relatively low given the information provided in these discussions..

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Preferred Methods to Access Research Papers

"Don’t neglect ResearchGate either. That’s a free and 100% legal avenue where researchers post their own work."

"Try arXiv.org as well, they host papers for free."

"I use Researchgate and CiteSeer as well as scihub, libgen and arxiv.org"

Alternative Methods to Access Research Papers

"I only use sci-hub if all else fails, but it usually is able to find anything not accessible through usual means. Especially handy for more obscure articles from pre 90’s, since most library licenses don’t go back so far. Just to add, I use a chrome extension called “Open access button” which will check if any (legal) OA version of the paper exists when you are on the web version."

"Regardless, sci-hub is the resource I use, and it’s done well by me for over half a decade now."

Pirated Research Paper Websites

"I only know of Sci-Hub and then /r/Scholar. I have only used the Scholar subreddit once after I couldn't find my article on Sci-Hub, but I got the paper I needed rather quickly."

"Nexus is the best way right now. Their [telegram bots](https://twitter.com/the_superpirate/status/1621818918292561920) have almost all articles up to date., especially Elsevier. paste DOI and Single click, done."

Ethical and Legal Concerns

Conclusions, jump to top, "public access: the pros and cons of open-access publishing".

Not used in article

"[D] Thoughts on IEEE Access as a journal?"

"what is your opinion about open access journals", "(pdf) piracy: a threat to academicians and publishers - researchgate", "is downloading really stealing the ethics of digital piracy", "(pdf) legality and ethics of web scraping - researchgate", "lpt: when looking for more reliable, professional sources for academic writing. try adding pdf on the end of your search", "how can i gain access to scholarly articles for free to use as sources for a paper".

Here are my notes:

• Reddit thread from 3 years ago with 11 points discussing the issue of gaining access to scholarly articles for free, particularly for academic research papers.
• Users suggest various tools to access scholarly articles for free, including Google Scholar, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), and gen.lib.rus.ec (Scientific Articles). These tools can help search for Open Access publications and find PDFs of articles that are not paywalled.
• Another user suggests talking to librarians about remote access options, particularly if one is part of a university.
• Other suggestions include looking for specific OA journals and even reaching out to authors directly for access. Various academic databases, like the ones available through university libraries, may also be helpful for those affiliated with an institution.
• The legality of some of these methods are questioned by some users, including Sci-hub and other tools that may involve non-legal means.
• Many users express gratitude for the suggestions provided, indicating that the issue of accessing scholarly articles for free is more widespread than one may think.

"Access to published articles for free from journals such as Nature?"

Unfortunately, since this is a Reddit post with over 30 comments and replies, summarizing this page in 400 words without losing important information would be difficult. Nonetheless, the main points that I see as relevant to the query are:

• Various websites allow users to access research papers for free, including Sci-Hub, ResearchGate, arXiv.org, MedRXiv, and bioRxiv.
• Different Reddit users suggest different methods to access the papers, including pasting the URL or DOI of the article on sci-hub or searching for the article directly on the site; using an Open Access button extension for Chrome to check if an open-access version of the article exists or a PaperPanda Chrome extension to automatically find a full-text copy of the article; visiting the author’s research group website to access their posted research for free or reaching out to the author directly to request a copy.
• Users mention that they prefer accessible sources over Sci-Hub, but resort to it when no other option is available. Some caution users to prioritize checking whether an open-access version of the paper is available and to reach out to authors first before using Sci-Hub.
• Elsevier, a publishing company, receives extensive criticism in the discussion for their predatory fees and poorly-designed manuscript submission pages.
• Users suggest that library subscriptions may provide free access to certain articles, but access is typically limited to certain journals and depending on the affiliation of the individual.
• Some users caution that preprints - versions of papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed - may have errors that are not caught yet, so users should take the extra step to fact-check those papers.
• Extension authors commend the Unpaywall extension that displays a link to an unpaywalled version of the paper when the user is on a journal page.
• Users discuss the struggles of submitting papers, including experiencing errors and difficult interactions with publishers, and the frustration of high fees.
• Some users provide helpful tips like checking Google Scholar for free versions of papers or using archive.is to access the internet archive version of blocked URLs.

"Home - Free Legal Research Resources - Harvard Library Guides"

"7 ways to access journal articles without breaking the bank - bitesize bio", "📌 here are some sites where you can find sources and references for your review of related literature (rrl) in research and the most powerful academic search engines for references".

• The webpage provides a list of websites where resources and references for research can be found, including various academic search engines.
• The list includes links to websites like PDFDrive, Global ETD Search, Theses.fr, Springer Link, OhioLINK, Lib Guides Community, DOAJ, BASE, Eric, Infotopia, Google Scholar, Refseek, The Virtual LRC, SweetSearch, and DeepDyve.
• PDFDrive is described as a source for over 205 million books for direct download in all disciplines.
• Global ETD Search Engine provides access to over 4 million PDF studies.
• Theses.fr is a scientific database of theses and diaries for students and researchers.
• Springer Link is a website that provides access to paid researches and books for free.
• OhioLINK provides access to more than 65,000 master’s and Ph.D. theses that can be read and downloaded.
• Lib Guides Community is a website that offers research and exploration service over 318,968 research guides supervised by over 53,731 librarians in 3,856 libraries worldwide.
• DOAJ allows you to download more than 9,000 respectable court scientific journals for free.
• BASE is one of the world’s most massive search engines especially for open electronic scientific sources.
• Eric is an online digital library of education research and information, providing easy access to educational resources to support their use in improving learning and teaching practices, educational decision-making, and research.
• Infotopia is a research engine for students that provides information and an archive of art sites and topics, history, social sciences, issues, and community problems.
• Google Scholar is a scientific researcher from Google that offers an easy way to research on a large scale in scientific material. It allows users to search through many disciplines and sources like articles, university letters, books, summaries, and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional associations, and other sites.
• Refseek is a search engine dedicated to students and researchers that categorizes more than a billion subjects, including web pages, books, encyclopedia, magazines, and newspapers.
• The Virtual LRC is an indexing system of thousands of the best academic information sites, selected by teachers and libraries around the world, to provide students and teachers with the proper information for academic projects for schools and universities.

SweetSearch is a website that helps students quickly collect information, identifying the most relevant findings from a credible resource list and facilitates them to find initial sources away from unwanted sites and marginal sites that lack academic rigor.

"internet archive scholar", "14 websites to download research paper for free – 2023", "a researcher’s complete guide to open access papers", "eight ways (and more) to find and access research papers", "what is the best way to find research papers".

• Title of Reddit thread: “What is the best way to find research papers?”
• Posted 7 years ago under subreddit “scientificresearch”
• User asks for help in finding free or cheaper scientific research papers
• Reddit user suggests using Google Scholar as a way of finding free, full-text research articles
• They provide instructions on how to find full-text articles on Google Scholar using the “All 5 versions” link and how to use regular Google search to find non-academic sites that carry an article
• Other Reddit users provide additional free databases such as PubMed Central, BioMed Central, Science Direct, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Directory of Open Access Repositories (Open DOAR), HighWire, OCLC World Catalog, Social Science Research Network, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, and Science.gov
• Under each database listed, the user provides a brief description of what each one offers and what fields of study they cover
• Some Reddit users suggest finding an email address for the author and asking for the article directly or using a friend’s login to access restricted content
• One user suggests enrolling in a local community college to get access to some databases or connecting to their Wi-Fi for access
• Another user suggests using “Mendeley” to manage research and find free full-text articles

"The 8 <b>Best Open Access Journal Sites</b> for Students "

"21 legit research databases for free journal articles in 2022", "i made a list of academic research websites, i hope you find some helpful.", "ethical challenges in accessing participants at a research site", "federal privacy protections: ethical ... - ama journal of ethics", "is downloading pirated games illegal", "what is a pirated game what are the differences between it and the actual game", "accessing elsevier papers".

• Paywalls and accessing research papers can be a frustrating experience for students and researchers.
• Elsevier is a journal publisher that makes contributions and access to science expensive, especially for those who are financially-pressed, leading to difficulty accessing many relevant papers in the field.
• Various methods are discussed for overcoming this hurdle, ranging from emailing researchers directly to requesting inter-library loans.
• One Redditor comments that researchers are generally eager to share their papers for free.
• Other suggestions include reaching out to a researcher via social media, or asking for help on Twitter or Reddit via the “icanhazpdf” hashtag or /r/scholar subreddit.
• Some users recommend using platforms like Sci-Hub or Library Genesis, which offer access to a vast repository of research papers.
• However, these platforms often face legal issues.
• Other comments suggest checking authors’ personal websites for archived versions of papers or even emailing the authors to ask for a copy of the paper.
• Some users also recommend finding connections at other universities who may have access to the desired journal.
• Another option is to search for pre-prints or draft copies of the papers on platforms such as Arxiv or BioArxiv.
• One Redditor commented that librarians are often very helpful in finding hard-to-acquire papers via inter-library loans.
• It is noted that there are some ethical considerations when deciding to use pirated versions of research papers.
• A discussion is also present regarding the legal issues surrounding paywalls, with some noting that accessing publicly funded research being published behind paywalls should not be considered piracy.
• Some individuals have organized to establish their own alternative publishing methods, as highlighted in the resignation and formation of a new journal by the editorial board of Journal of Combinatorial Theory Ser. A.
• Some specific websites recommended for accessing research papers include Sci-Hub (now blocked in many countries), Library Genesis, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Arxiv and BioArxiv, among others.
• Others cautioned that some of these sites are not reliable and may carry risks such as malware.
• Overall, there are a variety of options available for accessing research papers that require subscriptions.

"Publication ethics: Role and responsibility of authors"

"pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers", "ethical challenges in online research: public/private perceptions", "is it unethical or illegal to cite papers obtained through sci-hub or libgen".

• The webpage is a thread on Reddit titled “Is it unethical or illegal to cite papers obtained through Sci-hub or Libgen?” and was posted 4 years ago on the subreddit r/AskAcademia.
• The thread has 7 points and contains 12 comments as of the time it was posted.
• Some commenters in the thread argued that it is unethical and potentially illegal to use research papers obtained through websites like Sci-hub and Libgen because it violates copyright law.
• Others argued that the high cost of accessing research and the fact that many authors are happy to share copies of their work justifies the use of these websites.
• One user who identified themselves as a librarian stated that while the high cost of academic publishing is unethical, users should do their best to obtain free versions of research papers before obtaining them through sites like Sci-hub and Libgen.
• This user also suggested using tools like Open Access Button to find freely available copies of research before resorting to these websites.
• Another commenter stated that they would be flattered if someone obtained their work illegally because it meant that their research was valuable.
• Several commenters suggested that pirating research through websites like Sci-hub and Libgen was necessary for individuals living in countries without access to academic resources.
• Some users argued that the academic publishing industry itself is unethical and unfair to the public because it puts taxpayer-funded research behind paywalls and sells it back to the public.
• One user joked that it was unethical to cite books they returned to the library on time.
• Overall, the thread highlights the controversial nature of using sites like Sci-hub and Libgen to obtain research papers and the varied opinions on the ethical implications of doing so in the academic community.

"ELI5: How a company can 'catch' you for pirating"

"besides sci-hub, does anyone know where else i can get a pirated article".

• One Reddit user suggests /r/Scholar and has used it successfully once after Sci-Hub did not have the paper. (Karma: 24)
• Another user suggests using Nexus and their Telegram bots for articles, especially those from Elsevier. (Karma: 1)
• A third user recommends checking with the librarian at one’s college, contacting authors, posting on Twitter with the hashtag #ICanHazPDF, and using LibGen. (Karma: 18)
• One user has never gotten a response from an author before. (Karma: 2)
• Another suggests checking out Filepursuit and posting the DOI or link on Reddit. (Karma: 3)
• A user recommends using the Unpaywall browser extension to see if the paper is available for free on other sites. (Karma: 2)
• Arxiv.org is recommended as a source of free pre-reviewed articles by another user. (Karma: 2)
• Wosonhj.com is suggested for those who cannot find articles on Sci-Hub. (Karma: 1)
• LibGen is mentioned multiple times as a resource for books and papers. (Karma: 1, 1)
• ResearchGate and CiteSeer are also suggested for requesting papers from authors. (Karma: 1, 1)
• Someone asks for help accessing a specific research paper. (Karma: 1)
• One user reiterates that paying for a scientific article is unnecessary. (Karma: 2)
• Another user confirms that the response rate on ResearchGate is good. (Karma: 1)

"Open Access Versus Traditional Publishing - Amnet EnableOA"

"pros and cons of traditional and open access publishing", "sci-hub&#39;s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription ... - aaas".

💭   Looking into

Comparison between Open Access and traditional subscription-based publishing models

Advantages and disadvantages of accessing pirated research papers online

Top 5 most reliable websites to download pirated research papers

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How to get past paywalls and read scientific studies

By Whitson Gordon

Posted on Oct 23, 2019 9:37 PM EDT

4 minute read

Popular Science stories often link directly to scientific studies. You can get all the information you need from the articles themselves, and even more from these links, but if you get the urge to investigate further—perhaps to see the data for yourself—you’ll want to read the study firsthand. Unfortunately, many academic papers are hidden behind expensive paywalls.

There’s a lot to say about the academic research industry, but many believe scientific studies should be freely available to the public . Even if you find a paper that’s hidden behind a paid subscription, there are ways to get it for free—and we’re not talking about piracy. Often, the study you’re looking for may be freely, legally available elsewhere, if you know how to find it.

Google (Scholar) it

Don’t get discouraged just because one database says you need to pay for a specific study. Search for the title of the study (or a portion of the title with an author’s last name) on Google Scholar , the Google-powered search engine for academic literature. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a result with an [html] or [pdf] link on the right-hand side of the page, which should link you to the full text of the study.

If for some reason the right sidebar link doesn’t work, you can also click the “All 11 versions” link at the bottom of each result block to see more sites that offer the paper. You could also try searching regular ol’ Google for the paper’s title, perhaps with the filetype:PDF operator as part of your search terms. This may help you find it on sites that aren’t crawled by Google Scholar.

Use browser extensions to your advantage

If you’re a journalist, student, or science nerd who finds yourself regularly hunting for full-text articles, you can streamline the process a bit with a browser extension called Unpaywall . It works with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and displays a small padlock icon on the right side of your browser window whenever you visit a page dedicated to a scholarly article. If there’s a paywall and the padlock is green, that means Unpaywall found a free version somewhere on the web, and you can click the icon to visit it immediately. In my experience, this doesn’t find much more beyond a Google Scholar search, but it’s a lot easier than performing manual searches all the time. Heck, even if a site isn’t paywalled, Unpaywall’s green icon is still easier than hunting for the “Download PDF” button on a given page.

A tool called Open Access Button does something similar. It’s browser-agnostic and has been around for a bit longer, so try both tools and see which you like better. I think Unpaywall feels a bit smoother, but Open Access Button’s maturity may help you find things Unpaywall doesn’t know about yet.

Check your local library

Many public libraries subscribe to academic databases and share those subscriptions with their constituents. You may have to head to the library’s physical location to get a library card, if you don’t have one already, but those are usually free or cheap. And from then on, you should be able to access a lot of your library’s resources right from your computer at home, including scholarly journals (not to mention other paywalled magazines like Consumer Reports). If your library doesn’t have access to the publication you’re looking for, they may even be able to get it through an inter-library loan . If you ever feel lost, don’t hesitate to ask a librarian—they probably know the process like the back of their hand, and will do their best to help you find what you’re looking for.

If you’re a student, your school or university likely has access to more databases than you can shake a stick at (not to mention hordes of physical journals you can hunt through). If you aren’t a student but have a college nearby, ask them if they offer fee-based library cards—you may be able to pay for in-house access to their vast resources.

Email the study’s author

Finally, if you can’t find a paper anywhere online, you might be able to get it directly from one of the people who wrote it. The money earned by those paywalls doesn’t go to the researchers—it goes to the publisher, so authors are often happy to give you a copy of their paper for free (provided they’re allowed to do so).

Finding their current email address is the hard part. Papers will often contain an email address you can contact for questions, but if this becomes out of date, you’ll have to do a little hunting. Find the university or organization the researcher currently works for, not the one they worked for when the study was first published. A little Googling can usually point you in the right direction, but sites like ResearchGate and LinkedIn can also help. Some researchers have a personal website that may be up to date, as well, and in some cases, may even have their previous work available to download. But if not, shoot them a message, ask politely if they’d be willing to send you a copy, and thank them for their hard work.

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A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature

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Stay Connected With Semantic Scholar Sign Up What Is Semantic Scholar? Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the Allen Institute for AI.

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The top list of academic search engines

1. Google Scholar

4. science.gov, 5. semantic scholar, 6. baidu scholar, get the most out of academic search engines, frequently asked questions about academic search engines, related articles.

Academic search engines have become the number one resource to turn to in order to find research papers and other scholarly sources. While classic academic databases like Web of Science and Scopus are locked behind paywalls, Google Scholar and others can be accessed free of charge. In order to help you get your research done fast, we have compiled the top list of free academic search engines.

Google Scholar is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only lets you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free but also often provides links to full-text PDF files.

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles
• Abstracts: only a snippet of the abstract is available
• Related articles: ✔
• References: ✔
• Cited by: ✔
• Links to full text: ✔
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, RIS, BibTeX

BASE is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany. That is also where its name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles (contains duplicates)
• Abstracts: ✔
• Related articles: ✘
• References: ✘
• Cited by: ✘
• Export formats: RIS, BibTeX

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open-access research papers. For each search result, a link to the full-text PDF or full-text web page is provided.

• Coverage: approx. 136 million articles
• Links to full text: ✔ (all articles in CORE are open access)
• Export formats: BibTeX

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need anymore to query all those resources separately!

• Coverage: approx. 200 million articles and reports
• Links to full text: ✔ (available for some databases)
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX (available for some databases)

Semantic Scholar is the new kid on the block. Its mission is to provide more relevant and impactful search results using AI-powered algorithms that find hidden connections and links between research topics.

• Coverage: approx. 40 million articles
• Export formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX

Although Baidu Scholar's interface is in Chinese, its index contains research papers in English as well as Chinese.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 100 million articles
• Abstracts: only snippets of the abstract are available
• Export formats: APA, MLA, RIS, BibTeX

RefSeek searches more than one billion documents from academic and organizational websites. Its clean interface makes it especially easy to use for students and new researchers.

• Coverage: no detailed statistics available, approx. 1 billion documents
• Abstracts: only snippets of the article are available
• Export formats: not available

Consider using a reference manager like Paperpile to save, organize, and cite your references. Paperpile integrates with Google Scholar and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons:

Google Scholar is an academic search engine, and it is the clear number one when it comes to academic search engines. It's the power of Google searches applied to research papers and patents. It not only let's you find research papers for all academic disciplines for free, but also often provides links to full text PDF file.

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI. Sematic Scholar was publicly released in 2015 and uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries for scholarly papers.

BASE , as its name suggest is an academic search engine. It is hosted at Bielefeld University in Germany and that's where it name stems from (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine).

CORE is an academic search engine dedicated to open access research papers. For each search result a link to the full text PDF or full text web page is provided.

Science.gov is a fantastic resource as it bundles and offers free access to search results from more than 15 U.S. federal agencies. There is no need any more to query all those resources separately!

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

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Disguising Reddit sources and the efficacy of ethical research

Joseph reagle.

Communication Studies, Northeastern University, 215 Holmes Hall, 43 Leon St, 02115 Boston, MA USA

Associated Data

Not applicable. Research data are: (1) research reports, (2) phrases from those reports taken from Reddit, and (3) interviews with the authors of the reports. The first two datasets are confidential so as not to embarrass researchers. The third set is confidential because they were obtained via a consent form that sated: “The confidentiality of your research records will be strictly maintained. Records of our discussion will be (1) kept separate from this consent form, (2) not shared with others, and (3) kept on an encrypted file system.”

Not applicable.

Concerned researchers of online forums might implement what Bruckman ( 2002 ) referred to as disguise . Heavy disguise, for example, elides usernames and rewords quoted prose so that sources are difficult to locate via search engines. This can protect users (who might be members of vulnerable populations, including minors) from additional harms (such as harassment or additional identification). But does disguise work? I analyze 22 Reddit research reports: 3 of light disguise, using verbatim quotes, and 19 of heavier disguise, using reworded phrases. I test if their sources can be located via three different search services (i.e., Reddit, Google, and RedditSearch). I also interview 10 of the reports’ authors about their sourcing practices, influences, and experiences. Disguising sources is effective only if done and tested rigorously; I was able to locate all of the verbatim sources (3/3) and many of the reworded sources (11/19). There is a lack of understanding, among users and researchers, about how online messages can be located, especially after deletion. Researchers should conduct similar site-specific investigations and develop practical guidelines and tools for improving the ethical use of online sources.

Introduction

Reddit is known as the “front page of the web,” claiming “52 M + daily active users” and “100K + communities” (Reddit, 2021 ). Millions of Redditors, including minors and other vulnerable populations, have thousands of subreddits to discuss extraordinarily specific and sometimes sensitive topics, including sexuality, health, violence, and drug use.

Given the public prominence, breadth, and depth of Reddit’s content, researchers use it as a data source. Proferes et al., ( 2021 ) identified 727 such studies published between 2010 and 2020-May. They found that only 2.5% of their studies claimed to paraphrase compared to the 28.5% of the studies that used exact quotes. Researchers who do paraphrase write of limiting the locatability of sources and possible consequent harm. (The studied reports are not quoted or cited directly, see the “Ethics” section below.) I am not aware of cases, fortunately, of online users coming to harm because of information in research reports. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, and given the sensitivity of topics and vulnerability of sources, additional scrutiny could be consequential to users’ health, relationships, employment, and legal standing. (For a more general discussion of potential harm, sensitive topics, and sources, see Franzke et al., ( 2020 ), § 3.2.5.) Additionally, I note that users need not be personally identified to feel embarrassed, to be harassed, or to be forced to abandon a long-held pseudonym. And researchers themselves, whose use of public sources is thought to be outside of human subjects review, might face embarrassment or repercussions nonetheless if a source complains. Paraphrasing sources’ prose might mitigate such outcomes.

Verbatim quoting and paraphrasing are two practices within a spectrum of what Bruckman ( 2002 ) identified as disguise , which can range from none to heavy. Disguise can also include altering usernames and the context of a message, such as the time and forum of posting.

I analyze 22 Reddit research reports: 3 of light disguise, using verbatim quotes, and 19 of heavier disguise, claiming to reword phrases. I test if their sources can be located via three different search indexes (i.e., Google, Reddit, and RedditSearch). I was able to locate all of the verbatim sources (3/3) and many of the reworded sources (11/19). I also interview 10 of the reports’ authors about their sourcing practices, influences, and experiences. These conversations reveal that there is a lack of coherent practice and guidance on effective disguise, the importance of search and archival affordances, and how errors can arise amidst multi-author collaborations and during the review and revision process. Most importantly, these interviews identify exemplary practices, such as researchers testing their own disguises.

The present work does not address whether researchers should disguise their sources. This decision depends on the type of research, the sensitivity of the topic, the vulnerability of the sources, and the attributes of the venue. Rather, my concern is empirical: when researchers choose to employ disguise, does it work? And what, then, can we do to improve the practice?

Background and terminology

Reddit and sensitive topics.

Reddit was founded in June 2005 as a pseudonymous-friendly site for users to share and vote for links they had read (i.e., “I read it.”) Reddit’s development as a forum of forums, where users could trivially create subreddits, each with its. own moderators, led the website to succeed over its link-sharing peers.

Like Twitter and Wikipedia, Reddit serves an extraordinary corpus of mostly public data. That is, while there are private and quarantined subreddits, the vast majority of content is public : transparently accessible to any web browser or search engine. More so than Wikipedia and much of Twitter, Reddit hosts discussions of a personal character. Subreddits on sexuality, health (including mental health and eating disorders), interpersonal abuse and violence, and drug use and cessation have been topics of research. Reddit is a compelling and accessible venue, but with sensitive – even if public – information.

Ethics and Online Research

The practice of online research has been accompanied by discussion of how to do so ethically (Eysenbach & Till, 2001 ; Flicker et al., 2004 ; Mann & Stuart, 2000 ; Reid, 1996 ; Smith & Murray, 2001 ; Waskul & Douglas, 1996 ). And the issues noted by Siang ( 1999 ) over two decades ago remain salient today: of “the blurred distinction between public and private domains,” “the ease of anonymity or pseudonymity,” “the suspension of temporal barriers with the recording and archiving of communications,” and “the relatively low cost, easy to use, technological means to facilitate tracking of participants.”

An intuitive approach to these early concerns was to apply existing research guidelines to the online context, such as those from the American Psychological Association (King 1996 ) and other disciplinary and national societies. At the same time, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) was constituted as a transdisciplinary endeavor, which created and maintains guidelines for online research (Ess & Committee 2002 ; Franzke et al., 2020 ).

Institutional review boards (IRBs) can also be a source of guidance and review. Like much of the disciplinary guidelines, however, their focus tends to be on human subjects research, where there is an interaction between researchers and subjects. Most Reddit research (86.1%) makes no mention of “IRB” or “ethics review.” Of those that do, the majority (77.2%) note an exempt status, though it’s unclear if this is “an official designation given by a review board or whether the authors made this judgment themselves” (Proferes et al., 2021 , p. 14).

What is clear is that there is no widely accepted and consistent practice when it comes to reporting excerpts of public content. Systemic literature reviews show this (Ayers et al., 2018 ; Proferes et al., 2021 ), as will the present work. For those concerned with disguising public data, there’s little guidance on how to do so effectively.

Online Sites, subjects, and sources

The incoherent approach to public data is related to a lack of agreement about terminology and substance. What should researchers call those whom they research online? I distinguish between subjects , those with whom researchers interact, and sources , authors of public content with whom researchers do not interact. (Recall that I use public to mean content that is transparently accessible to any web browser or search engine.) There is also the question of Reddit terminology. Following the architecture of Reddit, I distinguish between posts and their subsequent comments within a thread . I refer to posts and comments, generically, as messages .

Beyond terminology, what should researchers do? There is substantive disagreement compounded by different understandings of terms. Sharf ( 1999 , p. 253), for example, argued that researchers should contact public sources “in order to seek consent” and “implied consent should not be presumed if the writer does not respond.” Rodham & Gavin ( 2006 ) responded “that this is an unnecessarily extreme position to take” and wrote, “messages which are posted on such open forums are public acts, deliberately intended for public consumption.” Presently, I analyze published research reports and seek their sources, without consent. Unlike Sharf’s study of a breast cancer email list (“public” because the list is “open” for anyone to join), published reports are closer to Rodham and Gavin’s sense of the term (i.e., “intended for public consumption”).

Increasingly, researchers are engaging in site-specific considerations, which requires contextual ethical reasoning, be it at Wikipedia (Pentzold 2017 ), at sites where “we are studying people who deserve credit for their work” (Bruckman et al., 2015 ), or public sites where people, nonetheless, discuss sensitive topics or share images (Andalibi et al., 2017 ; Ayers et al., 2018 ; Chen et al., 2021 ; Dym & Fiesler, 2020 ; Haimson et al., 2016 ). For example, on Twitter, Fiesler & Proferes ( 2018 ) found that “few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about.” Additionally, as I will show, specific websites have affordances that affect how sources can be located (e.g., novel search capabilities or external archives).

De-Identifying, Anonymizing, fabricating, and Disguising

Researchers who attempt disguise note that their sources might be struggling with health, sexuality, or drug use, and additional scrutiny might cause them harm. For the reasons that follow, I speak of disguising public sources to prevent them from being located .

Bruckman ( 2002 ) identified a spectrum of disguise, from none to heavy. Under light disguise, for example, “an outsider could probably figure out who is who with a little investigation.” The forum is named, usernames and other details are changed, yet “verbatim quotes may be used, even if they could be used to identify an individual.” Under heavy disguise , some false details are introduced and verbatim quotes are avoided if a “search mechanism could link those quotes to the person in question.” If the heavy disguise is successful, “someone deliberately seeking to find a subject’s identity would likely be unable to do so.” Moderate disguise is “a compromise position … incorporating some features of light disguise and some of heavy disguise, as appropriate to the situation.” Kozinets ( 2015 , p. 3473) adopted this notion in his discussion of ethical netnography though he used the term cloaking “to emphasize the researcher’s protective actions rather than the state of the participant.” This is a good point, but disguise is the more common term in the literature.

In commercial contexts, enterprises use sanitization to remove sensitive information such as “credit card numbers, email addresses and Social Security Number (SSN)” (Nguyen & Cavallari 2020 , pp. 37–38). In human subjects research, such as healthcare, de-identification “involves the removal of personally identifying information in order to protect personal privacy” (Guidelines for Data de-Identification or Anonymization, 2015). Anonymized is sometimes used synonymously with de-identified, or can have a stronger connotation of data being rendered incapable of being re-identified. I avoid anonymized because it is far too an assured word given the known cases of failure (Ohm 2010 ). And in public data contexts, there might not be personally identifiable information to speak of given the use of pseudonyms. Even so, users need not be personally identified to feel exposed or embarrassed, to be harassed, or to be forced to abandon a long-held pseudonym.

Introducing false or combined details about a source has been referred to as fabrication , a tactic of heavy disguise. The practice is not limited to prose and can include visual content, such as a profile picture in a screenshot (Haimson et al., 2016 ). This practice can conflict with traditional notions of research rigor and integrity. Markham ( 2012 ) argues that if done with care, fabrication can be the most ethical approach. If not done with care, however, fabrication can lead to suspicions of fraud (Singal, 2016 ).

UnGoogling has been used for “obscuring published data and analysis from index, search, and retrieval for ethical purposes” (Shklovski & Vertesi, 2013 , p. 2172). And obfuscating has been used to speak of the “deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection” (Brunton & Nissenbaum 2015 , p. 1). UnGoogling is too service-specific and is more often used to describe users removing themselves from the Google ecosystem, such as abandoning Android for iOS. Obfuscation ’s most common use is to describe users protecting their privacy rather than as a research practice.

I examine research reports who disguise their public sources to keep them from being located .

Locating sources

What of the substance, the process, of locating research subjects or sources? Sometimes the ethnographic subjects themselves, of a small town, for example, can recognize themselves and their neighbors. Sometimes real-world events, such as the occurrence of a murder, provide a clue to the public (Reyes, 2017 , n. 9; Singal, 2015 ). And when a researcher from a top-tier New England university describes their research using undergrads from a top-tier New England university, the subjects are probably their students. Online, messages’ prose style (Narayanan et al., 2012 ), timing (Johansson et al., 2015 ), and network relationships (Zhou et al., 2016 ) serve as digital fingerprints (Brown & Abramson, 2015 ), amendable to digital forensics (Guarino, 2013 ), which can lead to online accounts and even personal identities being linked together (Backes et al., 2016 ). For example, Narayanan & Shmatikov ( 2009 ) were able to re-identify a third of users in their “anonymous” Twitter graph who also had a Flickr account “with only a 12% error rate … even when the overlap between the target network and the adversary’s auxiliary information is small.”

As far back as the 1990s, King ( 1996 ) faulted Finn & Lavitt ( 1994 ) for disguising sources’ names, but not that of the sexual abuse forum or the date and time of posts. More recently, Zimmer ( 2010 ) critiqued researchers from a top-tier New England university for creating a “Tastes, Ties, and Time” Facebook dataset that was improperly – perhaps impossibly – “anonymized.” The data was obtained by Harvard Resident Advisors acting as research assistants and scraping their Facebook friends lists. And once the school and cohort were known, other aspects of students’ tastes, ties, and activity made re-identification possible (e.g., being the only student from a specific country in the dataset). Journalists, too, sometimes participate. At the New York Times , Barbaro & Zeller ( 2006 ) reported on – and confirmed – the potential to locate sources in an AOL dataset. A decade later, in the same newspaper, Singer ( 2015 ), wanting to speak to a source in a research study, was able to identify, contact, and interview the subject.

Concerned researchers have started to assess how often usernames, quotations, and media are included in research reports. Ayers et al., ( 2018 ) analyzed 112 health-related papers discussing Twitter and found 72% quoted a tweet, “of these, we identified at least one quoted account holder, representing 84%.” When usernames were disclosed, in 21% of the papers, all were trivially located. Ayers et al. wrote that these practices violate International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) ethics standards because (1) Twitter users might protect or delete messages after collection, and (2) revealing this information has no scientific value.

Proferes et al., ( 2021 ) performed a systematic overview of 727 research studies that used Reddit data and were published between 2010 and 2020-May. They found “Sixty eight manuscripts (9.4%) explicitly mentioned identifiable Reddit usernames in their paper and 659 (90.7%) did not. Two hundred and seven papers (28.5%) used direct quotes from users as part of their publications, 18 papers used paraphrased quotes, noting they were paraphrased (2.5%) and 502 (69.1%) did not include direct quotes” (Proferes et al., 2021 , p. 14).

I make no claim as to whether sources should be disguised. Rather, I ask if a researcher chooses disguise, does it work? Can the original message used by a researcher be located? If so, the full message, associated username, and context (i.e., subreddit, thread, and posting history) are then available. This, itself, could be revealing or linked with other information, including personally-identifying information.

I collected two sets of research reports. In 2020, I sought ethnographic-type research reports since 2015 that included Reddit messages. I searched via Google using keywords such as “AoIR guidelines,” “privacy,” “verbatim,” and “fabrication.” I found three reports using light-disguise with verbatim phrases and three claiming heavier disguise with reworded phrases. In 2021, as part of a panel proposal, I discussed this work with two of the authors of a systematic review of Reddit (Proferes et al., 2021 ), and they kindly shared their list of reports that “paraphrased” Reddit messages, adding 16 new reports to my initial set. Because paraphrase can connote significant change, I use the term reword , which can be as minimal as inserting an adjective or altering a place or name. The final corpus, then, included 22 reports, with 19 claiming to reword.

From each report, I collected phrases of more than ten words because any less than that is too short for meaningful searches. I excluded phrases from subreddit documentation such as sidebars, wikis, or FAQs; these have multiple authors and are informative rather than personal disclosures.

The process of locating Redditors’ original messages was idiosyncratic: intensive, manual, and subjective. I performed exact searches (using quotation marks) and inexact searches across the whole phrase and fragments of novel-seeming prose. Near the end of this work, and hoping to share a method of scrambling phrases and testing disguises, I wrote a script that automated the invocation and opening of search query results (Reagle & Gaur 2022 ). Even so, I had to use discretion with how many search results to review, usually no more than the first page or 20 results – each search service returns results differently. I made no effort to personally identify Reddit users. However, locating sources, as I attempted, could be the first step in the distinct process of identifying users.

After my initial analysis, I emailed the research reports’ authors and asked if they would speak with me. If so, and they completed the consent form, I began with five questions about their practice, rationale, influences, and thoughts about my efforts. We worked to identify weaknesses to avoid and strengths to emulate as part of research and publication. One interview was a ~ 30-minute voice communication, others were via email exchanges with each subject. Interviewees were allowed to review my characterization of their work and our discussion in this report.

Though I used public research reports and their own Reddit sources in my analysis, they are not identified, cited, or quoted. I wanted candid interviews with researchers free of possible embarrassment. I hope that “someone deliberately seeking to find a [subject’s or source’s] identity would likely be unable to do so” (Bruckman 2002 ). That said, other Reddit researchers who are conversant with the literature could make guesses about the identity of research sources. Should this happen, I believe my sources have plausible deniability.

This method was specified as part of Institutional Review Board application #20-08-30 and “approved” as DHHS Review Category #2: “Exempt… No further action or IRB oversight is required as long as the project remains the same.”

Analysis and discussion

Table  1 describes the reports’ approaches to phrases, number of sources, and how many were located. The rightmost column has strengths (bold Ⓢ) to emulate and weaknesses (Ⓦ) to avoid in creating effective disguise relative to reports’ stated policy, actual practice, and ease of location. Importantly, all reports articulated a policy of disguise in their approach to sources, even if weak (i.e., removed usernames but included verbatim quotes).

Research reports and results (“i” = interview)

Searching reddit and the meaning of deletion

Authors V1 and V2 both relied on the fact that Redditors are typically pseudonymous. They included verbatim quotes without the authors’ usernames (i.e., light disguise).

V2 claimed that because pseudonyms are encouraged, the quoted Redditors could not be traced. This claim is highly probable, but digital forensics can sometimes link pseudonyms with other identities, especially as it is easy to peruse all of a user’s posts. Additionally, users who maintain multiple accounts can mistakenly post a message with the wrong account. Even though such users can edit or delete mistaken messages, it’s likely the original will survive elsewhere.

V1 was more cognizant of these concerns and stated they only used posts wherein Redditors explicitly declared they were using a throwaway (single-use) account. However, oddly, V1 did include verbatim quotes from a few Redditors who wrote why they chose not to use a throwaway . A researcher might inadvertently collect posts with the term “throwaway” even if the Redditor was explaining why they did not do so.

The research reports of V1 and V2 each had about twenty phrases (of ten or more words), and I was able to locate almost all of them using three indexes of Reddit content.

Table  2 represents the relative usefulness of the three search services across all 22 research reports. Oddly, Google under-performed (“†”) in verbatim searches because it did not return any of V1’s 18 sources from Reddit. Google’s search algorithms are opaque and ever-changing, so I do not know why it missed these posts, but they could become locatable in the future. Indeed, much could change, and search engines’ capabilities are likely to improve. When removing V1 from the calculation, Google’s verbatim rate is 45%.

Percent of sources found (non-exclusively) at service

RedditSearch (using the Pushshift service) was the most generative search engine because it permits accurate time and subreddit searches. In practice, winnowing away misses is as important as roughly matching hits. It also returned some posts that had since been deleted by their authors, including from V1’s users who did not use throwaways – and perhaps regretted that decision and deleted their posts. Similarly, I was able to locate phrases from deleted posts in the reports of V1, R6, R14, and R18.

The deletion of messages by Redditors suggests that users can feel exposed even when using pseudonymous or throwaway accounts. Users should appreciate that deleted messages on Reddit can be archived and indexed off-site. Researchers should appreciate that they could inadvertently publicize such messages.

Additionally, the Pushshift data originally contained public and private subreddits (determined by moderators) and can include quarantined subreddits (determined by Reddit for problematic but not yet banned) (Stuck_In_the_Matrix, 2019 , 2015 ). Pushshift data has also been packaged in common “big data” frameworks, permitting even more powerful queries and analysis. For example, BigQuery (Balamuta, 2018 ) was used by R5, R6, and R17; ConvoKit ( 2018 ) was used by R9. Locating sources via these resources would add additional capabilities beyond the human-facing searching engines I limited myself to.

Making mistakes and the need for a system

V3 argued that because the site is premised on Redditors competing for upvoted visibility, the site can be taken as public. Even so, V3 elided all usernames, except for two central characters in their report. They quoted phrases from a couple of posts and a handful of comments. This made it easy to find their sources. I was also able to (redundantly) find a post by looking for V3’s description of a meme via a Google image search.

Upon reading V3’s report I was confused by the positioning of Redditors as authors deserving credit in a public venue (hence no consent was obtained), yet, also of a need to elide most Redditors’ usernames (while quoting their prose verbatim). V3 responded that the approach to sources and its description changed during the reports’ review and editing: “originally each of the pseudonyms was formally cited, but this was removed in an earlier stage of peer review.” The confusion in the description was the likely result of this change “and not picked up during the copy-editing stage of the journal.”

R12 also reflected on the likely cause of mistakenly including verbatim phrases. Because of the massive size of their data, “we only paraphrase those we would actually use in the paper.” The process of managing the manuscript and sources then became a problem: “We initially inserted the original quotes into the draft and did one round of paraphrasing. But writing was an iterative process, especially when review & resubmit was involved, during which we might switch in and out quotes as appropriate.” Having multiple authors work on this no doubt contributed: “We probably thought one person on the research team did the paraphrasing.”

Similarly, R16 intended to change all the quotes and believed they had: “I obviously didn’t do a thorough job at it, and I don’t know why – was I aiming to keep the authenticity of the quotes, or was I simply running out of time and did not work diligently? Probably both.” Ethical disguise had been at the forefront of their mind at the start, but perhaps not later: “Was I weighing up the risk of [sources] being identified in this context of technologies used by parents? Certainly in my ethics application, but probably not as much in the reporting.” R5, R6, R10, and R19 similarly included verbatim phrases contrary to their stated policy, perhaps because of similar reasons as the researchers above.

Balancing Fidelity and disguise

Many of the interviewees spoke of the challenge of balancing fidelity to sources’ sentiments with the ethical concern of limiting sources’ exposure.

With respect to identities, V3 shared that “The intention here was to not explicitly name Redditors (using their pseudonym) unless there was a reason to do so.” That is, “My ethical practice defaulted to anonymity, but when necessary for the discussion I used the pseudonyms that the user provides to the public forum.” Two prominent Redditors “are named because of how identifiable their content is and how widely it has been shared across platforms (including sites such as KnowYourMeme).” Additionally, one “username itself was worthy of comment as a signifier of geek humor.” And, once published, the “study gave them significant appreciated notoriety on Reddit and beyond,” something they welcomed.

With respect to verbatim phrases, V3 recognized that phrases can be searched for. However, “What you can find this way is a user’s publicly available (shared) content and pseudonym, not their ‘real name’.” In any case, “As researchers we understand that ethics is a process, not something that is achieved once it is rubberstamped by an institution.” As part of V3’s process, “I considered the trade-off between potential tracking back to a pseudonym and fair representation. The expectation of users, popularity of content, and lack of real names also fed into this calculation.”

R2 attempted to disguise sources and this was a shift in practice from earlier work, where they “included the usernames and preserved quotations.” The earlier work had been influenced by an AoIR presentation about a site wherein the Redditors saw themselves as creative developers worthy of and preferring attribution. “And, because I believed part of my argument about Reddit hinged on the creative play that Redditors engaged in, I wanted to preserve usernames (as this is one of the places where this kind of play occurred).” However, “given the nature of the online sphere these days (this was pre-Gamergate), I would likely not have made the same choice.”

Additionally, the “AOIR guidelines have been hugely influential” in R2’s practice. The guidelines respect that research practices “are not one-and-done decisions, but that things like anonymizing [online] identities/quotes are ongoing decisions that we need to make. IRB guidelines are pretty much worthless in this regard, as they would consider any public forum ‘public’ and their understanding of how easy it is to find out information based on usernames or quotes is limited in my experience.”

The AoIR guidelines were influential to R3, R16, and R18 as well. Other noted influences included boyd ( 2007 ), Kozinets ( 2015 ), and especially Markham ( 2012 ).

Changing practice and changing context

Unlike R2’s past work, in their present report, usernames were elided and phrases from posts and comments were lightly reworded. Though Google can be astoundingly good at finding similar phrases when the field is sufficiently narrow, the modest rewording was sufficient to frustrate my efforts with Reddit, Google, and RedditSearch. However, those messages appeared in threads whose titles were included verbatim in the report, and this leaked information was useful in locating sources. Once in the right thread, it was trivial to locate phrases from the report. Not only did verbatim titles become avenues for locating messages, but they can also be sensitive disclosures.

Like V3, R2 changed their level of disguise during the report’s review: “This piece was a content analysis, and so in my first draft of the article I actually preserved this material as-is, because I wanted to be transparent and make my study potentially replicable.” However, reviewers found this to be problematic because it could open the Redditors to trolling. R2’s forums were not sensitive per se : “I would absolutely have issues with someone using usernames/direct quotes from a health or relationship subreddit for obvious reasons.” Yet, personal disclosures were made in the studied forums and its users are sometimes targets of harassment. R2 agreed with the concern and altered the quoted phrases: “the outlet and the reviewers made a difference in this case.”

R2’s experiences speak to the importance of site-specific context and the larger zeitgeist. A practice on one subreddit might not be appropriate to another, especially after larger events increase the likelihood of trolling and harassment. Similarly, R15 noted that “I think ethical use of social media posts for research has to take context into consideration – it’s a different thing to quote someone posting from a public Twitter account than it is to burrow into an obscure subreddit and identify one comment on a long thread to surface.” And the social media context is dynamic: “With more and more news-style platforms grabbing social media posts without permission to use as comments in news articles we might even see a shifting culture around what people think is permissible once they’ve posted something publicly. Or this practice might result in pushback in which people demand to be asked permission or credited for their posts!”

The world that researchers seek to understand is ever-changing, as are the technical affordances of media platforms and search services. It can be difficult to match ethical policy to the quickly shifting online world, as can implementing that policy with consistent practice, especially given the time and changes needed during a reports’ publication.

Effective tactics of disguise

R1’s report is a detailed ethnography of a few identified subreddits that is well-grounded with descriptions of community concerns and quotes from Redditors. Yet there were only two phrases (of more than 10 words) to attempt to locate. Most of everything else was from subreddits’ documentation (not sensitive) and interviews (not indexed by search engines). Confidential interviews of public Redditors can enable a surprising degree of richness, disclosure, and confidentiality.

Otherwise, searching for 150 + sources in the 22 research papers reveals that the metaphor of finding a needle in a haystack (of returned search results) is apt. Reports that focus on a single subreddit (as stated or inferred) in a single year winnow away much of the hay. Additionally, changes of punctuation, switching to or from contractions, single word insertions or removals, and retaining novel words are usually insufficient disguise.

Larger datasets – or less specific descriptions – and more substantive changes are more effective. R9, for example, included 11 effectively disguised phrases. Their dataset included over a million posts over a dozen subreddits – their haystack was large. Additionally, their technique for disguising the phrases might be an effective consequence of an analytic technique used to normalize text into a canonical form: “normalization is an approach to finding long English phrases in online vernacular and replace them with concepts in clinical knowledge sources. For instance, ‘shortness of breath’ in a post is replaced by the term ‘edema’ or ‘dyspnea.’”. Though this technique was not created to disguise sources, it seemingly serves that purpose.

The rigor of testing and disciplinary differences

R3 used about ten reworded phrases from Reddit; I was not able to locate their sources.

Two influences at the start of R3’s career – as well as the sensitive topics they tend to study – led to a rigorous process for disguising sources. Today, their process is an iterative one, of swapping in synonyms or larger rephrasing “in a way that doesn’t change the meaning and yet would be untraceable. If someone were to put that quote in Google and try to find it there … they wouldn’t be able to do that.” To accomplish this, R3 performs the task themselves. That is, they seek to locate their own disguised sources – though, as seen above, Google is not the only index of Reddit messages. And their method is akin to my method here: using exact searches (in quote marks), near searches (without quote marks), and focusing on portions of a phrase, while conceding the process is “pretty subjective.” Just as with my method, they have to choose how to specify the search and how many returned results to review.

R3’s germinal influences were an event and a scholar. First, as a doctoral student, they saw another researcher’s source publicly disclosed because of the inclusion of a verbatim quotation. This was “an example of how [verbatim quotes] can be a problem.” Second, subsequently, R3 learned of Markham ( 2012 )’s coining and explication of “ethical fabrication,” giving R3 a name and rationale for something similar to what R3 was already doing.

Today, in their role as an editor and reviewer, R3 sometimes asks researchers to reflect on their sourcing practice and rationale, with those in their discipline tending to be thoughtful about this issue. Elsewhere, though, R3 has experienced pushback against fabrication, such as in a presentation before a group of network-analytic sociologists. The audience was upset when they learned they were seeing fabricated, rather than authentic, quotes and images in the presentation.

R4 employed similar tactics as R3, changing “gender, location, specific details of an incident etc. so that, while they convey the original thought of the author, they cannot be traced back to them.” They tested these disguised phrases using a Pushshift-related service and “shared the two snippets with others in the team in order to see if the rephrase is too far off.”

R14 was the third interviewee to test their disguises. Though R14 used Pushshift in other work, they did not test their disguises against RedditSearch/Pushshift. Instead, they pursued the tactic of change-and-test “until I couldn’t find the quote + reddit in Google.” I was able to locate many of their sources because I limited my queries to the Reddit website (i.e., site:reddit.com) in Google. This extra specificity plus the year led to many of R14’s sources.

R16, too, has tested their disguises in the past via Google, “but I don’t know if I did it with this paper. And I certainly did not try other search engines.”

If a researcher wants to use disguised public data, rather than interviews, then the best disguise is tested disguise. This means investigating where their data sources are likely to be archived, how it all can be searched, and using as many facets of search as possible to test their efforts.

Limitations and Future Work

The present work is idiosyncratic and relatively small in scale; nonetheless, it shows that the practice of disguise is often haphazard and ineffective. The next step is to investigate automated methods for managing and disguising sources. That is, can automated programs and services alter phrases for inclusion in reports with more or less efficacy than humans? Managing sources could be easy as keeping quotes, their source, and their disguise in a spreadsheet shared among collaborators – and this could then facilitate automatic testing. The next phase of the current work tests the feasibility and efficacy of this approach (Reagle & Gaur, 2022 ) .

The web and the services that index it are dynamic. Google routinely updates its search algorithms, and in April of 2022 – after the data and collection in the present report – Reddit announced they had extended their search facility to comments and made their searches less literal: “100% of a query doesn’t have to match the text of a post to return relevant results. By doing this we saw a 60% increase in results for queries that previously didn’t receive results” (Staff, 2022 ). Such changes will affect how easy it is to locate a source. Though such changes could make location more difficult by crowding out the true source, it is clearly the intention of services to improve their search efficacy.

Another practical follow-up is to increase the understanding of risks and options among researchers. King ( 1996 ) faulted Finn & Lavitt ( 1994 ) for leaking information about source context decades ago, and yet it still happens. A guide that builds on Bruckman ( 2002 )’s categories of disguise and identifies risks and options available to the researcher could help authors, reviewers, and editors. The guide could include a checklist of things to attend to for a given category of risk and disguise. And it could be complemented by site-specific information about conventions and norms, and affordances around user identity and message persistence and locatability.

Finally, messages appeared in research reports that were subsequently deleted by their authors – even if from pseudonymous and throw-away accounts. This merits more attention and work-in-progress indicates throwaway accounts regularly – routinely even – delete posts in advice subreddits.

Conclusions

There is no single research policy appropriate to disguising online sources. For example, community members might expect or appreciate recognition as creative authors. Like V3’s two Redditors who gained additional notice for appearing in her report, R18 noted that “One of the moderators of a subreddit I used reached out to me on ResearchGate and thanked me for my research and steps toward harm reduction; they were happy that I used material from their subreddit.”

If researchers chose to use disguise, however, their practice ought to effectively match their policy. I found descriptions of ethical policy that were confusing or inconsistent with actual practice. In a few cases, this was the result of changes made during the review and editing process. In another case, I suspect it was an oversight in data collecting and reporting. Many others simply made mistakes or failed to appreciate the affordances of Reddit and web searching.

The RedditSearch interface to the Pushshift repository proved especially useful in locating sources. And such data can be repackaged in ways that permit even more powerful searching capabilities (e.g., BigQuery and ConvoKit). While some researchers might use these resources in large-scale analyses, other researchers were unfamiliar with them. In addition to advanced search capabilities, these resources also mean that researchers who use them might include data since deleted by users in research analyses and reports.

The highest level of disguise, eliding usernames and rewording prose, can be effective, especially when the reworded phrases are tested against search engines – the practice of a few interviewed researchers. However, concerned researchers should be as specific as possible in their test queries, taking advantage of site, date, and subreddit facets.

My interviewees shared how their practices changed relative to their research sites, the larger cultural context, and their influences and experiences. The different approaches we see in reports, however, are not necessarily the result of a consistent policy (i.e., from conception to publication), fully cognizant of technical affordances (e.g., Google’s site: facet and RedditSearch/Pushshift existence and abilities), and users’ wishes (e.g., when users delete posts from throw-away accounts). The research community can improve on this, though, via similar site-specific investigations and practical guidelines that inform the conception, execution, and review of research. We also need additional work on automating, managing, and testing research disguise.

Acknowledgements

I thank the other panelists of the AoIR 2021 panel on Reddit and ethics, especially Michael Zimmer (Marquette University) and Nicholas Proferes (Arizona State University), who shared information with me about their large-scale survey of Reddit research. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights and suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to my interviewees, especially as their attention and time were under stress from COVID-19.

Availability of data and material (data transparency)

Code availability (software application or custom code), declarations.

Northeastern Univervisty Institutional Review Board application #20-08-30 and “approved” as DHHS Review Category #2: “Exempt… No further action or IRB oversight is required as long as the project remains the same.”

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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How to Write a Research Paper (+ Free AI Research Paper Writer)

Table of contents

Meredith Sell

Over the years, I've managed to vastly improve how I write research papers.

The three major game-changers for me, in terms of quality of the finished piece, have been:

• Following the research paper checklist (see below)
• Developing the thesis before starting to write
• And, more recently, using AI to improve my research paper draft

Let's break down each of these elements and produce the kind of research papers that get cited in magazines.

FREE AI research paper writer > FREE AI research paper writer >

What is a research paper, and how is it written differently?

Research papers are longer and more in-depth than essays. They require extensive research and evidence-based arguments. Research papers also typically have a more formal structure and require citations and references.When academics want to find a balanced and comprehensive view on a given topic, they usually seek a research paper.

Like most writing assignments, a research paper can be broken down into simple steps. Research papers follow the same basic writing process as explanatory or persuasive essays — but instead of making an argument or drawing greater meaning from the topic, the research paper is primarily concerned with concrete facts that may be analyzed, examined, or interpreted to better understand the paper’s central topic.

This is good news if you enjoy research: you’ll be doing a lot of it. The ultimate quality of your paper depends on you conducting thorough, complete research — and relying on reputable sources.

How to Properly Write a Research Paper Using AI

1. make a checklist based on the assignment description, and fill it out with ai.

Your professor has likely specified some criteria for your research paper:

• Length (in pages or words)
• Type of topic (the War of 1812, ancient Greece, agriculture, etc.)
• Elements that must be included, such as analysis, discussion, and comparison.
• Types of sources you must draw from (academic papers, encyclopedias, etc.)
• Source attribution style
• Formatting style

Go through the assignment description and create a checklist of those criteria. You can use this checklist throughout the research and writing process as well:

AI can really help you get some traction with your research paper in the preperation stage. This includes two main steps:

• Brainstorming paper topic idea
• Outlining based on your topic, basing the prompt on the assignment

2. Choose a topic you’re curious about, or use AI to help you with that

A sure way to write a boring research paper is to pick a topic you have no interest in, like summer temperatures in the desert or the life cycle of a flea. (Though someone’s probably interested in those things.)

Instead, follow your curiosity.

If your paper is for a writing class, you may have a lot of freedom to choose what you write about, so tap into your interests. Are you intrigued by the history of roller skating or the invention of the soccer cleat? Or how teen social dynamics have changed with evolving technology (think: home phones → online instant messaging → flip phones → smartphones)?

If you’re writing for a class in a subject like history, art, or science, you’ll probably have more restrictions on what you can write about — like a time period or type of art or science — but you can still use your curiosity to pick an interesting topic.

If you’re having a tough time, try brainstorming a list of things you’ve wondered about. Ask “ what’s up with… ” and see what comes to mind.

For example:

What’s up with traffic circles and why are they supposedly better for traffic patterns than a light or four-way stop?

What’s up with country music sounding more and more like hip-hop?

What’s up with people who have gluten allergies being able to eat bread in Europe but not the US?

Once you have a list, choose the topic you find most interesting (and appropriate for the assignment).

If your mind draws a blank, you can utilize AI to help you choose a topic. Let's say your course is about mid century art. You can go to a tool like Wotdtune and ask it to give you ideas for creative mid century art essays. See example below.

3. Develop your thesis (and guide your research) by asking a research question

Even though a research paper may not necessarily take a side on a topic, it still needs a thesis, aka a central idea or focus that drives the piece from beginning to end. 

We wrote a whole guide on writing thesis statements , so here we’ll just give you this tip:

Use a research question to develop your thesis

A research question is a variation on the “What’s up with…” questions from the last tip — but it will zoom in more specifically on the aspect of your topic that you’re investigating.

Why were the Irish so dependent on potatoes?

Did any women in ancient Greece enjoy relative freedom and autonomy?

You may already know the answer to these questions, or you may not. Either way, they give you a place to start in your research. Once you have your question, set out to:

• Find the initial answer.
• Gather more context (the who, what, when, where, why, how) around that answer.
• Revise your research question and turn it into your thesis.

This process helps tighten your focus from a broad topic that could fill books to a specific angle that can be meaningfully explored in the few pages of your paper.

Instead of the potato famine , write about why England was to blame for the potato famine’s devastating effects on the Irish.

Instead of ancient Greece or women in ancient Greece , write about how Spartan women’s lives differed from the lives of women in Athens.

4. Skim sources and use AI to perform research for your paper

Your research question can help you quickly determine whether information is relevant to your paper. As you gather initial sources, skim them — and then use your research question to decide whether to keep or discard the source. 

Does the source cover information relevant to my research question?

Yes: Keep to read later.

No: Discard and move on to the next source.

This approach will save you precious research time. You won’t waste limited hours reading sources that don’t have a single helpful fact.

If skimming is hard for you (as a deep reader, I get it), Wordtune can help. Paste the link to your online source, upload a scanned PDF, or copy the text, and the tool will scan and summarize for you. You can always come back later and closely read the most useful sources.

5. Make note of the most interesting facts you find

Along with taking detailed notes of your research (complete with all the source info you need to make proper citations), highlight the most interesting facts you come across. You could stick these in a section together or mark them in a way that makes them stand out.

Why should you do this?

Because later on, one of these fascinating factoids could have a direct connection to your thesis — and make a great hook for the start of your paper. Instead of digging through all of your notes to try to remember what that interesting tidbit was, you’ll be able to find it easily.

6. Organize your research

There are plenty of ways to organize your notes, but I suggest breaking them up into subtopics and categories.

• Subtopic: A topic related to your main topic or thesis that needs to be explained and understood by readers in order to understand your main topic or thesis. For example: Land ownership in Ireland under British rule.
• Category: An overarching concept that several subtopics fall under. For example: British restrictions on the Irish.

To start, I would focus on the subtopics and then group them into categories.

As you organize, use the formatting tools in your word processor to tag headings and subheadings. For example, all categories would be an H2 (Heading 2), while all subtopics would be an H3 (Heading 3). 

Tagging your categories and subtopics this way will help you develop your outline. Just organize your categories and subtopics in a logical order, and you’ll have a skeleton of an outline ready to go.

7. Write with your research document open

No one can remember everything they found while researching — you’ll need to reference your research document throughout the writing process. No question there.

But you can make this easier (and keep your writing process efficient) by:

Keeping your research document open and in clear view.

I like to put my draft document and my research document side by side on my screen, so I can see them both at the same time. 

Another approach would be to paste the information you need directly into your draft document — in the order you’ll need it. (Your outline will help you know what you need.)

8. Steal the TK trick from journalists

In the middle of drafting your paper, you find that you’re missing a fact. 

You neglected to write down how many Irish people starved due to the potato famine.

You don’t know what age Spartan women were able to own property.

Instead of derailing your writing and searching for that information, write the sentence you want to write and stick a “TK” where the missing fact should go.

“TK” stands for “to come” (don't ask us why) and is a placeholder used by journalists to mark missing information they’ll fill in later. Using TK allows you to keep writing without getting off track every time you discover your research didn’t cover everything.

A whopping TK Irish people starved, thanks to the combination of famine and British oppression.

At age TK , Spartan girls became women who were able to own property, a right that their sisters in Athens did not enjoy.

9. Revise, explain, paraphrase with AI as your research/writing assistant

Using the right researching tools can get you a lot way.

If you’re ever at a loss for words — writing clunky, clumsy sentences, struggling to explain a concept, or having a hard time paraphrasing a source — Wordtune can serve as your AI sidekick.  

Simply highlight the sentence in question and browse Wordtune’s suggestion for a better wording.

You can also use Wordtune Spices to come up with examples and counter arguments for whatever you're writing about or even find stats and facts, complete with source citations

Wordtune doesn’t do all of the writing for you, but it can help you sharpen your ideas on the sentence level, so you can hand in a research paper with good writing that’s still very much your own.

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