Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Unpaywall VS searchcode

Compare Unpaywall VS searchcode and see what are their differences

Unpaywall logo Unpaywall

Legally read research papers behind paywalls.

searchcode logo searchcode

A source code search engine
  • Unpaywall Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-16
  • searchcode Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-17

Unpaywall features and specs

  • Free Access
    Unpaywall provides a legal and free method to access millions of research papers, enabling users who may not have subscriptions to paywalled journals to benefit from scientific knowledge.
  • Large Database
    With a repository of millions of articles, Unpaywall offers a broad range of papers across various fields, increasing the likelihood of finding accessible versions of desired research.
  • Browser Integration
    Unpaywall offers a browser extension that seamlessly integrates with Chrome and Firefox, allowing users to easily access full-text articles without leaving their workflow.
  • Legal and Ethical
    Unpaywall sources its articles from legal repositories, ensuring that access to content is ethical and respects copyright laws.
  • Support for Open Access
    By promoting access to open access articles, Unpaywall supports the broader open access movement, which aims to make scientific research more readily available to everyone.

Possible disadvantages of Unpaywall

  • Inconsistent Availability
    Not all articles have open access versions available, so users may not always find the exact paper they are looking for via Unpaywall.
  • Quality Variation
    The availability of different versions of the articles might lead to variations in quality, such as preprints or author manuscripts, which might not be peer-reviewed.
  • Dependency on Publisher Policies
    The availability of free articles depends heavily on individual publisher policies regarding open access, which can vary widely and affect what content is accessible.
  • Limited to Research Papers
    Unpaywall primarily focuses on research articles, so other types of academic content like book chapters or conference proceedings may not be available.
  • Requires Internet Connection
    Users need an active internet connection to use Unpaywall, which could be a limitation in areas with poor connectivity.

searchcode features and specs

  • Comprehensive Search
    Searchcode provides a comprehensive search engine for code across different programming languages and platforms, enabling users to find code snippets and references quickly.
  • Language Support
    Searchcode supports a wide variety of programming languages, increasing its usability for developers working in diverse environments.
  • Open Source Projects
    It indexes vast repositories of open-source projects, which is beneficial for developers looking for reusable code and learning resources.
  • Syntax Highlighting
    The platform offers syntax highlighting for easier readability and understanding of code snippets directly on the search results page.
  • Advanced Filters
    Users can leverage advanced search filters to narrow down results, making it easier to find relevant code snippets quickly.

Possible disadvantages of searchcode

  • Limited Proprietary Code Access
    Searchcode primarily indexes open-source repositories, which may limit its utility for developers looking for code within proprietary projects.
  • Relevance of Results
    Search results might not always be perfectly relevant to the user's query, requiring additional filtering or browsing.
  • Interface Complexity
    The user interface may be complex for first-time users, which could lead to a learning curve before effectively using its features.
  • Dependency on External Sources
    As it aggregates code from different repositories, any changes or unavailability in source repositories can affect the reliability of search results.
  • Potential for Outdated Information
    Given the vast number of repositories, there is a possibility that some indexed code may be outdated or no longer maintained.

Analysis of Unpaywall

Overall verdict

  • Unpaywall is considered a good and ethical tool for accessing open-access academic content. It contributes positively to the open science movement, ensuring that research outputs are more broadly accessible.

Why this product is good

  • Unpaywall is a widely-used tool in the academic community for accessing open-access research papers. It aggregates open-access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, making it easier for researchers, students, and the general public to find free versions of scholarly articles. By providing access to papers that are legally available for free, it helps democratize knowledge and reduce the financial barriers to accessing scientific research.

Recommended for

  • Researchers looking for open access papers
  • Students conducting literature reviews
  • Faculty members seeking teaching materials
  • Librarians assisting patrons with resource access
  • Anyone interested in accessing scientific research legally and for free

Unpaywall videos

How to Access Research Articles for FREE with Unpaywall

More videos:

  • Review - Must-Have Browser Extensions: Unpaywall + LibKeyNomad | Your Librarian Friend
  • Review - Testing Unpaywall

searchcode videos

No searchcode videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Unpaywall and searchcode)
Education
100 100%
0% 0
Git
0 0%
100% 100
Productivity
70 70%
30% 30
Ebooks
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Unpaywall and searchcode

Unpaywall Reviews

14 Websites to Download Research Paper for Free – 2024
GetTheResearch.org is an Artificial Intelligence(AI) powered search engine for search and understand scientific articles for researchers and scientists. It was developed as a part of the Unpaywall project. Unpaywall is a database of 23,329,737 free scholarly Open Access(OA) articles from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use.

searchcode Reviews

We have no reviews of searchcode yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Unpaywall should be more popular than searchcode. It has been mentiond 44 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Unpaywall mentions (44)

  • First time a vacuum was ever created in a laboratory
    You might also find this interesting: https://unpaywall.org/. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Black holes eat faster than previously expected
    > can you detail what the possible issue is? Why? Are you in a position to help everyone? (As you probably guessed while reading the comment you replied to, I don't really need help; more on that below). "Occasional" is not universal; as you aren't getting the problem in a here-and-now sense you can probably play around with the "here" part by using Tor Browser to see if you can get to the article via the link... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • I am fuckin tired of every other short or video of being about another useless gpt promt or extension. Please give me better trusted resources
    There are many of course the problem is that the ai hallucination problem is still a huge issue. For instance, getting all of https://unpaywall.org/ or something similar into an LLM would be a boon for scientists, but... If you can't trust what it is saying you will end up going back to pull the source anyway. The analysis it provides would probably be helpful though. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Can the light from my grow light pass through The Gnat Preventive Chamber™ to the plants inside?
    For problem 1. I can recommend this browser extension: https://unpaywall.org/ it basically redirects you to a legally available free version of any article you are looking at, if it can find one. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Got a pub and can’t even view the full text article
    Try this: https://unpaywall.org, it’s legal. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

searchcode mentions (15)

  • Searchcode.com's SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours
    Searchcode doesn't seem to work for me. All queries (even the ones recommended by the site) unfortunately return zero results. Maybe it got hugged? https://searchcode.com/?q=re.compile+lang%3Apython. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Searchcode – search 75B lines of code from 40M projects
    Without saying what repos they prioritize, it's hard to take them seriously since some pretty simple searches were "uh-huh" e.g. https://searchcode.com/?q=kubelet&src=2&lan=55 versus https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=kubelet&literal=1 or the gold standard (although regrettably no longer open source) https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+kubelet&patternType=keyword&sm=0. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Searchcode.com — Comprehensive text-based code search, free for Open Source. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • How to disable Escape codes in Duck Duck Go Queries?
    You most likely can't. Not on DDG or other regular search engines, they usually do not index non-word characters. There are some dedicated search engines that do, like https://searchcode.com/, but these are usually confined to specific areas, like computer code. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Show HN: Lissom.CSS, a classless, minimalist, and themeable CSS library
    You have the ability to completely customize look & feel. Example sites using MVP.css include https://www.mondage.com https://searchcode.com. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Unpaywall and searchcode, you can also consider the following products

SCI-HUB - It provides mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers

GrepCode - GrepCode.com is a code search engine built by developers for developers to search and browse open...

arXiv - arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for scholarly articles.

Microlink - Extract structured data from any website

Google Scholar - Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly...

grep.app - grep.app searches code from over a half million public repositories on GitHub.