The longer I’ve been identifying on iNaturalist, the longer I’ve been needing to turn to scientific literature. Finding scientific works can be difficult. A lot of it seems to be locked behind paywalls or not available online at all. I’d like to hear what websites and resources other iNaturalist identifiers use to find identification keys.
Personally, I’ve found that Google Scholar, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Plazi, Zookeys, and Archive .org are helpful in locating literature that is publicly available, both old and new.
JSTOR has a lot of older articles, and if you create an account then you can read 100 articles per month for free. I think it used to only by like 10/month and I’d hit the limit more, but now it’s 100.
I document plants in Wikipedia. For that purpose, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is indispensable. For sources not in BHL, a simple google search sometimes turns up what I’m working for.
Contemporary sources are usually not found in BHL. Unfortunately, most of those are behind paywalls as you mentioned. If there’s something I really must have, I will make a physical trip to the local university library. A public university tends to give a “walk-in” like me direct access to a wealth of resources.
If the university doesn’t have what I want, or is not able to give me access for licensing reasons, I might request an inter-library loan from my local public library. For certain obscure resources, that might be my only option.
If all else fails, I sometimes send an e-mail to one of the authors. Most authors are more than happy to have their work documented in Wikipedia, and will therefore send a PDF without hesitation.
I’d definitely recommend checking out your local library! Many have subscriptions to those pay-walled databases so you can access them simply by signing in through the library’s website.
As an example, my library system provides access to EBSCO, JSTOR, WorldCat, and SIRS.
Anecdotally, if there’s a specific article you want to read, you might try reaching out to the author! Researchers don’t get residuals from database fees and many are more than happy to send you a copy of their work. If they’re associated with a university or other institution, their email address is likely listed in the faculty directory.
All of the above mentioned are good suggestions. For recent publications, I don’t hesitate to find an author’s email address and send them a reprint request (are they still called that?). Often I have a PDF from the author within hours.
For spiders only, the World Spider Catalog has copies of most papers and books which describe spiders, going back to the 1800s, searchable by species and listing the page numbers and figures where information about each species can be found (extremely useful for finding what you’re looking for in a 300-page monograph). The history of each scientific name is tracked, so you can find everything about a species even if it has gone through a dozen name changes. New papers are constantly being added.
It requires an account to download the papers, but that’s free and there’s no other requirement. Even without that, it’s a fantastic resource for finding scientific literature about spiders. I wish I knew of similarly well-organized resources for other taxonomic groups.
The only complaint I have is that some of the oldest papers are only scanned images of text, so it isn’t possible to copy and paste into a translator if they’re in Latin, German, or some other language I don’t know.
Google Translate has a scan feature which allows you to scan text with your phone and drop the text into the translator. Not sure if you could scan off of a computer screen and do it that way.