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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Personally I'd never include Scihub into my workflow in a way that shows up in a publication. But I'm happy and amused that others do. :D

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Yes. I am surprised that authors don't see the difference between linking (if link they must) to the authoritative source of the article as opposed to the distribution channel they happened to use to get hold of the full text of the article. To me, it feels like irresponsible bibliographic practice.

All four examples involve citations of the authoritative source that in addition have a link to the actual distribution channel they used. That seems to me to be more responsible bibliographic practice than simply omitting that information. Similarly, if the original article is written in a language you don't speak, you should also cite the translation you used.

To me, a link to an authoritative source would be a link to the web page (or pdf file) on the site of the journal that published the paper.

You wouldn't link to your friend's mailbox if it was your friend who sent you a copy of the article; why would you link to scihub for basically the same?

The problem is they might change that page or file in the future. You have no guarantee that what you're reading is the original version of the paper.

Absolutely. But that is the problem with online publishing in general.

Especially since many of the examples in the article are just the original URL with `.sci-hub.org` pasted after the domain!

And the sci-hub link does not work while the original does!

Example from article:

http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.org/science/article/pii...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014070070...

sci-hub.tw does work

> Personally I'd never include Scihub into my workflow in a way that shows up in a publication.

Clearly it was not meant to. Especially if you look at reference 4 here [1], it looks like the internal format of whatever reference database the authors used, was accidentally leaked into to references. Probably missing commas somewhere.

    HYPERLINK “http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11661-007-9094-9”\t“_blank”

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187538921...

It surprises me that there are people that do. Everybody I know uses sci-hub, but you wouldn't know it looking at their papers.

These people know exactly what they are doing, they're the revolutionary fighters.

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