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How to get past paywalls and read scientific studies

No need to fly the Jolly Roger, either.

By Whitson Gordon | Published Oct 23, 2019 9:37 PM EDT

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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The war to free science

How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls.

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The 27,500 scientists who work for the University of California generate 10 percent of all the academic research papers published in the United States.

Their university recently put them in a strange position: Starting July 10, these scientists will not be able to directly access much of the world’s published research they’re not involved in.

That’s because in February , the UC system — one of the country’s largest academic institutions, encompassing Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, and several other campuses — dropped its nearly $11 million annual subscription to Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of academic journals.

On the face of it, this seemed like an odd move. Why cut off students and researchers from academic research?

In fact, it was a principled stance that may herald a revolution in the way science is shared around the world.

The University of California decided it doesn’t want scientific knowledge locked behind paywalls, and thinks the cost of academic publishing has gotten out of control.

Elsevier owns around 3,000 academic journals, and its articles account for some 18 percent of all the world’s research output. “They’re a monopolist, and they act like a monopolist,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason , head of the campus libraries at UC Berkeley and co-chair of the team that negotiated with the publisher. Elsevier makes huge profits on its journals , generating billions of dollars a year for its parent company RELX.

This is a story about more than subscription fees. It’s about how a private industry has come to dominate the institutions of science, and how librarians, academics, and even pirates are trying to regain control.

The University of California is not the only institution fighting back. “There are thousands of Davids in this story,” says the head of campus libraries at the University of California Davis MacKenzie Smith, who, like other librarians around the world, has been pushing for more open access to science. “But only a few big Goliaths.”

Will the Davids prevail?

The academic publishing industry, explained

Imagine your tax dollars have gone to build a new road in your neighborhood.

Now imagine that the company overseeing the road work charged its workers a fee rather than paying them a salary.

The overseers in charge of making sure the road was up to standard also weren’t paid. And if you, the taxpayer, want to access the road today, you need to buy a seven-figure annual subscription or pay high fees for one-off trips.

We’re not talking about roads — this is the state of scientific research, and how it’s distributed today through academic publishing.

Indeed, the industry built to publish and disseminate scientific articles — companies such as Elsevier and Springer Nature — has managed to become incredibly profitable by getting a lot of taxpayer-funded, highly skilled labor for free and affixing a premium price tag to its goods.

Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish. Peer reviewers, the overseers tasked with making sure the science published in the journals is up to standard, typically aren’t paid either.

And there’s more: Academic institutions have to purchase exorbitant subscriptions priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars each year so they can download and read their own and other scientists’ work from beyond the paywall. The same goes for members of the public who want to access the science they’ve funded with their tax dollars. A single research paper in Science can set you back $30 . Elsevier’s journals can cost, individually, thousands of dollars a year for a subscription .

Publishers and journal editors say there are steep costs associated with digital publishing, and that they add value at every step: They oversee and manage peer reviewers and editors, act as quality gatekeepers, and publish an ever-larger number of articles each year.

We spoke with executives at both Elsevier and Springer Nature, and they maintain their companies still provide a lot of value in ensuring the quality of academic research. It’s true these companies are not predatory journals , businesses that will publish just about any paper — without any scientific vetting — for a fee.

In 2018, Elsevier’s revenue grew by 2 percent , to a total of $3.2 billion. Gemma Hersh, a senior vice president for global policy at Elsevier, says the company’s net profit margin was 19 percent (more than double the net profit of Netflix ).

But critics, including open access crusaders, think the business model is due for a change. “I think we’re nearing the tipping point, and the industry is going to change, just like the industry for recorded music has changed, the industry for movies has changed,” MacKie-Mason says. “[The publishers] know it’s going to happen. They just want to protect their profits and their business model as long as they can.”

It’s a business model as convoluted as the road you paid for but can’t use. And it grows more expensive for universities every year.

Now the status quo is slowly shifting. There is a small army of people who aren’t putting up with the gouging any longer.

This disparate band of revolutionaries is waging war on the scientific publishing industrial complex on three fronts:

• Librarians and science funders are playing hardball to negotiate lower subscription fees to scientific journals.
• Scientists, increasingly, are realizing they don’t need paywalled academic journals to act as gatekeepers anymore. They’re finding clever workarounds, making the services that journals provide free.
• Open access crusaders, including science pirates, have created alternatives that free up journal articles and pressure publishers to expand access.

If they succeed, the cloistered, paywalled way that science has been disseminated for the past century could undergo a massive transformation. The walls, in other words, could fall.

If paywalls fall, the impact would reverberate globally. When science is locked behind paywalls, it means cancer patients can’t easily access and read the research on their conditions (even though research is often taxpayer-funded). When scholars can’t read the latest research, “that hinders the research they can do, and slows down the progress of humanity,” MacKie-Mason says.

But there’s a big thing getting in the way of a revolution: prestige-obsessed scientists who continue to publish in closed-access journals. They’re like the road workers who keep paying fees to build infrastructure they can’t freely access. Until that changes, the walls will remain firmly intact.

How academic journals became so unaffordable

Scientific journals, published mainly by small scientific societies, sprouted up alongside the printing industry in the 17th century as a way to disseminate science and information about scientific meetings.

The first scientific journals, the Journal des sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London , were distributed via mail. Like all pre-internet publishing models, early journals sold subscriptions. It wasn’t the hugely profitable industry it is today.

After World War II, the business changed dramatically. The journals — which were mostly based in Europe — focused on selling subscriptions internationally, targeting American universities flush with Cold-War era research funding. “They realized you can charge a library a lot more than an individual scholar,” says Aileen Fyfe , a historian specializing in academic publishing at the University of St. Andrews.

As more and more journals popped up, publishing companies began consolidating. In the 1950s, major publishers started to purchase journals, transforming a once diffuse business into what’s been called an oligopoly : a market controlled by a tiny number of producers.

By the early 1970s, just five companies — Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis — published one-fifth of all natural and medical scientific articles, according to an analysis in PLOS One . By 2013, their share rose to 53 percent.

No single publisher embodies the consolidation, and the increase of costs, more than Elsevier, the biggest and most powerful scientific publisher in the world. The Dutch company now publishes nearly half a million articles in its 3,000 journals, including the influential Cell , Current Biology , and The Lancet .

And the consolidation, the lack of competition, means publishers can get away with charging very high prices.

When the internet arrived, electronic PDFs became the main medium through which articles were disseminated. At that point, “librarians were optimistic this was going to be the solution; at last, journals are going to become much, much cheaper,” Fyfe says.

But instead of adopting a new business and pricing model to match the new means of no-cost dissemination, consolidation gave academic publishers the freedom to raise prices. Starting in the late 1990s, publishers increasingly pushed sales of their subscriptions into large bundled deals. In this model, universities pay a hefty price to get a huge subset of a publisher’s journals, instead of purchasing individual titles.

The publishers argue the new mode of digital delivery has come with an array of additional costs. “We’re continuing to invest significantly in digital infrastructure, which has a lot of fixed costs that repeat each year. We’re employing thousands of technologists,” said Elsevier’s Gemma Hersh. “So it’s not the case that digital is cheaper.”

The publishers also say that the volume of articles they publish every year increases costs, and that libraries ought to be funded to pay for them. “The libraries are treated by the senior academics at these institutions as a fixed cost; they’re not a fixed cost,” says Steven Inchcoombe, the chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, which publishes the prestigious Nature family of journals.

In a July 10 statement , Hersh said of Elsevier’s battle with the UC system “this stalemate was avoidable” and that the company hopes “we can find a pragmatic way forward if there is will and engagement from both sides.”

The librarians beg to differ. For universities, the most frustrating development is that cost of access keeps rising at a very steep rate.

Take a look at this graph from the Association of Research Libraries. It shows the percent change in spending at university libraries. The category “ongoing resources expenditures” includes spending on academic journals, and it rose 521 percent between 1986 and 2014. Over that time, the consumer price index — the average increase of costs of common household goods — rose 118 percent.

Librarians at the breaking point

The University of Virginia has a website where you can see how much money its library is spending on journals. From 2016 to 2018, the costs for Elsevier journals increased by $118,000 for the university, from $1.716 million a year to $1.834 million.

The data shows that the university is also spending a lot of money for journals that no one who uses their library system reads. In 2018, the university paid Springer Nature $672,000 for nearly 4,000 journals — 1,400 of which no one ever accessed. No one at UVA read the Moscow University Chemistry Bulletin , or Lithology and Mineral Resources , for example.

Why are universities paying for journals that no one reads? “It’s a lot like the cable bundle — they tell you you’re getting 250 channels, but if you look inside your heart, you know all you want is ESPN and AMC,” says Brandon Butler , director of information policy at the University of Virginia Library. An individual journal subscription can cost a university thousands of dollars. “UVA is absolutely considering cutting these bundles,” he says. “It’s quite likely we will, unless the price and other terms change radically.”

As the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill librarian, Elaine Westbrooks is facing what she and so many other academic librarians call the “serials crisis”: “If we buy the exact same journals every year, I have to pay at least $500,000 more just for inflation,” she says. “I can’t afford it.”

In her ongoing negotiations with Elsevier, Westbrooks is considering “the nuclear option,” as she puts it. That is, canceling the subscription that gives UNC Chapel Hill students and faculty access to thousands of Elsevier journals.

“It felt very much in 2017 the librarians felt beaten by the system and they couldn’t afford it,” says David Stuart, the researcher behind a yearly survey on the academic publishing industry. “Whereas in 2018, you could feel there was a bit more strength and power emerging, and they had the ability to push back on the publishers a bit.”

Science funders increasingly are calling for open access

It’s not only librarians waking up to the fact that the costs of accessing science are unsustainable — so are science funders. A lot of the money that fuels this system comes from government grants. In the US, taxpayers spend $140 billion every year supporting research, a huge percentage of which they cannot access for free. When scientists do want to make their work open access (meaning published without a paywall), they’re charged an extra fee for that as well.

This year, a consortium of public research institutions in Norway canceled its Elsevier contract, a move that followed a research consortium in Hungary breaking ties with the Dutch giant. In Germany , nearly 700 libraries and research institutes made a deal with the publisher Wiley: For about 25 million euros, they’re paying to access journal content — but also demanding the work of their researchers, published in Wiley journals, be made open access for all at no additional cost.

These institutions and funders are also banding together as part of Coalition S : The agreement says all scientific publications that have sprung from publicly funded research grants must be published on open access journals or platforms by 2020.

“The ambition is if the University of California does this deal, Germany does this deal — we eventually get to the point where [all science is] open access. The libraries are no longer paying to subscribe, they’re paying to publish,” said Robert Kiley, the head of open research at the UK’s Wellcome Trust.

But open access doesn’t necessarily mean cheap. Currently, publishers typically charge academics to publish that way too. If you want your article to be open access in an Elsevier journal, you could pay anywhere from $500 — the fee to publish in Chemical Data Collections — up to $5,000, the fee to publish in European Urology.

“Open access is absolutely in the best interest of the research process,” Inchcoombe, the chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, says. “If you can pay once and then it’s free for everybody, you eliminate a lot of the friction from the system of access and entitlement.” He hopes publishing will transition, over time, to open access.

But he stresses that open access won’t change “the fact that if you do more research, and you want to communicate it to more people, then there is a cost of doing that that rises with volume.”

Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.

This brings us to another band of revolutionaries in the fight against the status quo: the scientists who want to find ways to circumvent the behemoth publishers.

Some scientists are saying no to the big publishers and spinning off open access journals of their own

The structure of academic publishing isn’t just a pain for librarians and funders; it’s a bad deal for academics too. Basically, scientists trade in their hard work, their results for their toils in the lab, for free, to a private industry that makes tons of money off their work, in return for prestige.

Some researchers have been waking up to this and spinning off freely accessible journals of their own. One of those scholars is a University of Cambridge mathematician named Timothy Gowers . In 2012, he wrote a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research and vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from Elsevier .

To his surprise, the post went viral — and spurred a boycott of Elsevier by researchers around the world. Within days , hundreds of researchers left comments commiserating with Gowers, a winner of the prestigious Fields Medal. Encouraged by that response, in 2016, Gowers launched a new online mathematics journal called Discrete Analysis . The nonprofit venture is owned and published by a team of scholars. With no publisher middlemen, access is completely free for all.

University of Montreal professor and open access researcher Vincent Larivière has helped take the Elsevier boycott another step further. In January 2019, the entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics (including Larivière) resigned , and moved to MIT Press to start another open access journal, Quantitative Science Studies .

Again, the move was a principled one. “There’s a universalistic aspect to science, where you want it to be available to everyone,” Larivière said.

Even in the absence of starting open access journals, though, some scientists have been taking quieter, but equally principled, stands. One paleontologist took his name off a paper because his co-authors wouldn’t publish in an open access journal.

One key reason scientists, librarians, and funders can fight back is because other crusaders have made research more accessible. Enter the pirates.

Pirating and preprints are also pressuring the publishing industry to increase access

Over the past decade, it’s been getting easier and easier to circumvent the paywalls and find free research online. One big reason: pirates, including Kazakh neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan. Her (illegal) website Sci-Hub sees more than 500,000 visitors daily, and hosts more than 50 million academic papers.

But Sci-Hub is just one tool to get around paywalls. Scientists are also increasingly publishing prepublication versions of their studies (often called preprints). These study drafts are free to access.

The problem is that often, these studies have not yet been peer-reviewed. But advocates of preprints say they’re a net benefit to science: They allow for the public discussion of papers before they’re set in a finalized form — a type of peer review. And there are more preprints than ever before. (Some of the preprint servers are owned by the big publishers too.)

To find these preprints, all it takes is a single click: Unpaywall , a browser extension, helps users find the preprints associated with paywalled journal articles.

These mounting pressures on the academic publishing industry aren’t so different from the pressures on the music industry in the late ’90s. If you recall, in the late ’90s, music pirating was suddenly everywhere. You could log in to Napster and Limewire and illegally download any song you wanted for free.

“Piracy seems to come in when there’s a market failure,” UVA’s Butler says, “and people aren’t getting what they need at a price that makes sense for them.”

But as Larivière points out, Sci-Hub isn’t a long-term solution, and eventually, it may not even be needed: “Once there’s no paywalls, there’s no Sci-Hub anymore.”

What’s standing in the way of a full-on revolution? The culture of science.

For now, the paywalls mostly stand. Elsevier’s profits have actually increased in recent years. And as Elsevier’s Hersh told us, while the volume of open access research published by the company has been growing, so has the volume of paywalled papers.

Even with the growing pressure from the open science crusaders, the publishers remain in an extremely strong and nimble position. More and more, Elsevier’s business is not in the publication of journal articles, but in data-mining its enormous library. That means it’s using analytics to report on research trends, recommend articles scientists ought to be reading, and suggest co-authors to collaborate with based on shared interests.

Even if the publishers lose ground on selling subscriptions, they’ll still offer a profitable service based on control of the content. Still, it’s not hard to imagine a future where more and more institutions of science simply ignore, or circumvent, the major publishers.

The growing popularity of preprints is giving them one avenue to escape. One could imagine a system where researchers upload their drafts to preprint servers and then other academics choose to peer-review the articles. After peer review and revision, that preprint paper could be given a stamp of approval and added to a digital journal. This system is called an overlay journal (in that the editing and journal gatekeeping is overlain on top of preprints), and it already exists to a small extent . (Gowers’s Discrete Analysis is an overlay journal.)

So it’s not technology or innovation holding science back from a revolution. “The biggest elephant in the room is how researchers are rewarded for the work they do,” said Theodora Bloom , the executive editor at BMJ .

At the moment, researchers’ careers — the grants they’re given, the promotions they attain — rise or fall based on the number of publications they have in high-profile (or high-impact) journals.

“If an academic has a paper in Nature or Science, that’s seen as their passport to their next grant or promotion,” said Bloom.

As long as those incentives exist, and scientists continue to accept that status quo, open access journals won’t be able to compete. In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals . One big reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality , and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.

“I’m also waiting to see change within academic culture,” says Fyfe, the historian. “Until we have enough academics who are willing to do something different, then I don’t see a big change happening.”

So for now, the revolution is just beginning. “Everyone agrees, in some way, the future is open access,” UVA’s Butler says. “Now the question is, in that future, how much control do the big publishers retain over every step in the scientific process? They’ve been working for over a decade to ensure the answer is the most possible control.”

Academic publishing isn’t a hot-button political topic. But it could be. “If citizens really cared, they could talk to their representatives and senators and tell them open access matters,” MacKie-Mason says, “and the government should get involved in changing this.“

Illustrations by Javier Zarracina

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How To Read Any Scientific Paper For Free

"you should never have to pay for taxpayer-funded knowledge.".

Note: the information in this article does not constitute advice. It is merely a description of common strategies people report for accessing the scientific literature.

If you have ever tried to read a scientific paper online, you have probably run into a paywall. Most scholarly papers are behind paywalls, as opposed to being open access. This can be especially frustrating knowing that a lot of research is funded with taxpayer dollars.

The first thing to try is simply to do an internet search of the paper title, perhaps adding “PDF” to your search. If that doesn’t work, there are are two other simple ways anyone can read a scientific paper for free :

Search for free versions , which are sometimes available;

Use Sci-Hub and download a copy;

E-mail the senior author , politely requesting a copy.

Below is a simple example, illustrating how you can access a paper using both methods above. Method #1, emailing the senior author, almost always works within a few days. Method #2 using Sci-Hub will work instantly, as long as you have internet access.

Example: accessing a paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Let’s say you discover this review paper about psychedelics. It looks interesting and it’s published in the prestigious journal, Nature Reviews Neuroscience :

You will always be able to see the title and abstract—the short summary of what the paper is about and its main conclusion. If it’s not an open access journal, you will not be able to access the rest of the paper (in most cases). Instead, you will be asked to rent or buy this article, or subscribe to the journal:

If the prices for individual papers or journal subscriptions seem intuitively high to you, trust your instincts. The largest academic publishers generate enormous profits, with margins that are often higher than mega corporations like Starbucks, Disney, and Big Tech.

In my view, you should never have to pay for taxpayer-funded knowledge. Luckily, anyone can access papers using the two methods I listed at the beginning. Here’s how they work using an example paper…

Method #1: Use these tools to check for free versions online

There are often free versions of papers available online. The following tools can be used:

Google Scholar or the Google Scholar Chrome extension

Unpaywall , Open Access Button , or PaperPanda

You will often be able to find free versions using any one of these tools.

Method #2: Use Sci-Hub to gain instant access.

Sci-Hub is a website that provides free access to research papers and books. It gets around publishers’ paywalls in different ways, providing access to literature in defiance of copyrights. The URL for Sci-Hub can change (Sci-Hub has been sued previously for copyright infringements) but it is easily findable.

The Sci-hub main page looks like this:

Now, simply paste in the URL or DOI code associated with your paper of interest and click “Open”:

You can now download a copy of the paper. That’s it. One drawback of Sci-hub is that it often will not have new papers which have recently been published.

Method #3: email the senior author and ask for a copy

Every paper will have a corresponding author. This is often the last name listed. There will be an email listed somewhere or an email icon next to one of the author names:

Once you have their email, you can send them a message, like this:

Dr. [Last Name], I am interested in your recent paper, [Title of Paper]. Would you be willing to send me a PDF? Thank you!

That’s it. If they read your email you will almost always get a short response including the full paper. However, scientists are busy people and often have full inboxes. It could take a few days (or longer) to hear back. The second method typically gets you access without delay.

Scientists are usually more than happy to share PDFs with anyone interested in their research. They also don’t see a single penny of any revenue generated by the sale of their published work by publishers.

If you're interested in learning more about the business of scientific publishing, open access science, and new innovations like Sci-Hub, check out these M&M podcast episodes:

M&M #57 | Alexandra Elbakyan: Sci-Hub, Open Data, Freedom of Information & the Democratization of Science .

M&M #17 | Michael Eisen: Scientific Publishing & the Business of Science .

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To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Amanda Hoover

Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows.

A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, which also owns Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED.) Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.

ChatGPT’s launch was met with knee-jerk fears that the English class essay would die . The chatbot can synthesize information and distill it near-instantly—but that doesn’t mean it always gets it right. Generative AI has been known to hallucinate , creating its own facts and citing academic references that don’t actually exist. Generative AI chatbots have also been caught spitting out biased text on gender and race . Despite those flaws, students have used chatbots for research, organizing ideas, and as a ghostwriter . Traces of chatbots have even been found in peer-reviewed, published academic writing .

Teachers understandably want to hold students accountable for using generative AI without permission or disclosure. But that requires a reliable way to prove AI was used in a given assignment. Instructors have tried at times to find their own solutions to detecting AI in writing, using messy, untested methods to enforce rules , and distressing students. Further complicating the issue, some teachers are even using generative AI in their grading processes.

Detecting the use of gen AI is tricky. It’s not as easy as flagging plagiarism, because generated text is still original text. Plus, there’s nuance to how students use gen AI; some may ask chatbots to write their papers for them in large chunks or in full, while others may use the tools as an aid or a brainstorm partner.

Students also aren't tempted by only ChatGPT and similar large language models. So-called word spinners are another type of AI software that rewrites text, and may make it less obvious to a teacher that work was plagiarized or generated by AI. Turnitin’s AI detector has also been updated to detect word spinners, says Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer. It can also flag work that was rewritten by services like spell checker Grammarly, which now has its own generative AI tool . As familiar software increasingly adds generative AI components, what students can and can’t use becomes more muddled.

Detection tools themselves have a risk of bias. English language learners may be more likely to set them off; a 2023 study found a 61.3 percent false positive rate when evaluating Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams with seven different AI detectors. The study did not examine Turnitin’s version. The company says it has trained its detector on writing from English language learners as well as native English speakers. A study published in October found that Turnitin was among the most accurate of 16 AI language detectors in a test that had the tool examine undergraduate papers and AI-generated papers.

Andy Greenberg

Matt Burgess

Caroline Haskins

Jessica Rawnsley

Schools that use Turnitin had access to the AI detection software for a free pilot period, which ended at the start of this year. Chechitelli says a majority of the service’s clients have opted to purchase the AI detection. But the risks of false positives and bias against English learners have led some universities to ditch the tools for now. Montclair State University in New Jersey announced in November that it would pause use of Turnitin’s AI detector. Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University did the same last summer.

“This is hard. I understand why people want a tool,” says Emily Isaacs, executive director of the Office of Faculty Excellence at Montclair State. But Isaacs says the university is concerned about potentially biased results from AI detectors, as well as the fact that the tools can’t provide confirmation the way they can with plagiarism. Plus, Montclair State doesn’t want to put a blanket ban on AI, which will have some place in academia. With time and more trust in the tools, the policies could change. “It’s not a forever decision, it’s a now decision,” Isaacs says.

Chechitelli says the Turnitin tool shouldn’t be the only consideration in passing or failing a student. Instead, it’s a chance for teachers to start conversations with students that touch on all of the nuance in using generative AI. “People don’t really know where that line should be,” she says.

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What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

Pew Research Center has conducted many surveys about abortion over the years, providing a lens into Americans’ views on whether the procedure should be legal, among a host of other questions.

In a  Center survey  conducted nearly a year after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that  ended the constitutional right to abortion , 62% of U.S. adults said the practice should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Another survey conducted a few months before the decision showed that relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the issue .

Find answers to common questions about abortion in America, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute, which have tracked these patterns for several decades:

How many abortions are there in the U.S. each year?

How has the number of abortions in the u.s. changed over time, what is the abortion rate among women in the u.s. how has it changed over time, what are the most common types of abortion, how many abortion providers are there in the u.s., and how has that number changed, what percentage of abortions are for women who live in a different state from the abortion provider, what are the demographics of women who have had abortions, when during pregnancy do most abortions occur, how often are there medical complications from abortion.

This compilation of data on abortion in the United States draws mainly from two sources: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute, both of which have regularly compiled national abortion data for approximately half a century, and which collect their data in different ways.

The CDC data that is highlighted in this post comes from the agency’s “abortion surveillance” reports, which have been published annually since 1974 (and which have included data from 1969). Its figures from 1973 through 1996 include data from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and New York City – 52 “reporting areas” in all. Since 1997, the CDC’s totals have lacked data from some states (most notably California) for the years that those states did not report data to the agency. The four reporting areas that did not submit data to the CDC in 2021 – California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey – accounted for approximately 25% of all legal induced abortions in the U.S. in 2020, according to Guttmacher’s data. Most states, though,  do  have data in the reports, and the figures for the vast majority of them came from each state’s central health agency, while for some states, the figures came from hospitals and other medical facilities.

Discussion of CDC abortion data involving women’s state of residence, marital status, race, ethnicity, age, abortion history and the number of previous live births excludes the low share of abortions where that information was not supplied. Read the methodology for the CDC’s latest abortion surveillance report , which includes data from 2021, for more details. Previous reports can be found at  stacks.cdc.gov  by entering “abortion surveillance” into the search box.

For the numbers of deaths caused by induced abortions in 1963 and 1965, this analysis looks at reports by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a precursor to the Department of Health and Human Services. In computing those figures, we excluded abortions listed in the report under the categories “spontaneous or unspecified” or as “other.” (“Spontaneous abortion” is another way of referring to miscarriages.)

Guttmacher data in this post comes from national surveys of abortion providers that Guttmacher has conducted 19 times since 1973. Guttmacher compiles its figures after contacting every known provider of abortions – clinics, hospitals and physicians’ offices – in the country. It uses questionnaires and health department data, and it provides estimates for abortion providers that don’t respond to its inquiries. (In 2020, the last year for which it has released data on the number of abortions in the U.S., it used estimates for 12% of abortions.) For most of the 2000s, Guttmacher has conducted these national surveys every three years, each time getting abortion data for the prior two years. For each interim year, Guttmacher has calculated estimates based on trends from its own figures and from other data.

The latest full summary of Guttmacher data came in the institute’s report titled “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2020.” It includes figures for 2020 and 2019 and estimates for 2018. The report includes a methods section.

In addition, this post uses data from StatPearls, an online health care resource, on complications from abortion.

An exact answer is hard to come by. The CDC and the Guttmacher Institute have each tried to measure this for around half a century, but they use different methods and publish different figures.

The last year for which the CDC reported a yearly national total for abortions is 2021. It found there were 625,978 abortions in the District of Columbia and the 46 states with available data that year, up from 597,355 in those states and D.C. in 2020. The corresponding figure for 2019 was 607,720.

The last year for which Guttmacher reported a yearly national total was 2020. It said there were 930,160 abortions that year in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, compared with 916,460 in 2019.

• How the CDC gets its data: It compiles figures that are voluntarily reported by states’ central health agencies, including separate figures for New York City and the District of Columbia. Its latest totals do not include figures from California, Maryland, New Hampshire or New Jersey, which did not report data to the CDC. ( Read the methodology from the latest CDC report .)
• How Guttmacher gets its data: It compiles its figures after contacting every known abortion provider – clinics, hospitals and physicians’ offices – in the country. It uses questionnaires and health department data, then provides estimates for abortion providers that don’t respond. Guttmacher’s figures are higher than the CDC’s in part because they include data (and in some instances, estimates) from all 50 states. ( Read the institute’s latest full report and methodology .)

While the Guttmacher Institute supports abortion rights, its empirical data on abortions in the U.S. has been widely cited by  groups  and  publications  across the political spectrum, including by a  number of those  that  disagree with its positions .

These estimates from Guttmacher and the CDC are results of multiyear efforts to collect data on abortion across the U.S. Last year, Guttmacher also began publishing less precise estimates every few months , based on a much smaller sample of providers.

The figures reported by these organizations include only legal induced abortions conducted by clinics, hospitals or physicians’ offices, or those that make use of abortion pills dispensed from certified facilities such as clinics or physicians’ offices. They do not account for the use of abortion pills that were obtained  outside of clinical settings .

(Back to top)

The annual number of U.S. abortions rose for years after Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973, reaching its highest levels around the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to both the CDC and Guttmacher. Since then, abortions have generally decreased at what a CDC analysis called  “a slow yet steady pace.”

Guttmacher says the number of abortions occurring in the U.S. in 2020 was 40% lower than it was in 1991. According to the CDC, the number was 36% lower in 2021 than in 1991, looking just at the District of Columbia and the 46 states that reported both of those years.

(The corresponding line graph shows the long-term trend in the number of legal abortions reported by both organizations. To allow for consistent comparisons over time, the CDC figures in the chart have been adjusted to ensure that the same states are counted from one year to the next. Using that approach, the CDC figure for 2021 is 622,108 legal abortions.)

There have been occasional breaks in this long-term pattern of decline – during the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, and then again in the late 2010s. The CDC reported modest 1% and 2% increases in abortions in 2018 and 2019, and then, after a 2% decrease in 2020, a 5% increase in 2021. Guttmacher reported an 8% increase over the three-year period from 2017 to 2020.

As noted above, these figures do not include abortions that use pills obtained outside of clinical settings.

Guttmacher says that in 2020 there were 14.4 abortions in the U.S. per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. Its data shows that the rate of abortions among women has generally been declining in the U.S. since 1981, when it reported there were 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women in that age range.

The CDC says that in 2021, there were 11.6 abortions in the U.S. per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. (That figure excludes data from California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey.) Like Guttmacher’s data, the CDC’s figures also suggest a general decline in the abortion rate over time. In 1980, when the CDC reported on all 50 states and D.C., it said there were 25 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44.

That said, both Guttmacher and the CDC say there were slight increases in the rate of abortions during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Guttmacher says the abortion rate per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 rose from 13.5 in 2017 to 14.4 in 2020. The CDC says it rose from 11.2 per 1,000 in 2017 to 11.4 in 2019, before falling back to 11.1 in 2020 and then rising again to 11.6 in 2021. (The CDC’s figures for those years exclude data from California, D.C., Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey.)

The CDC broadly divides abortions into two categories: surgical abortions and medication abortions, which involve pills. Since the Food and Drug Administration first approved abortion pills in 2000, their use has increased over time as a share of abortions nationally, according to both the CDC and Guttmacher.

The majority of abortions in the U.S. now involve pills, according to both the CDC and Guttmacher. The CDC says 56% of U.S. abortions in 2021 involved pills, up from 53% in 2020 and 44% in 2019. Its figures for 2021 include the District of Columbia and 44 states that provided this data; its figures for 2020 include D.C. and 44 states (though not all of the same states as in 2021), and its figures for 2019 include D.C. and 45 states.

Guttmacher, which measures this every three years, says 53% of U.S. abortions involved pills in 2020, up from 39% in 2017.

Two pills commonly used together for medication abortions are mifepristone, which, taken first, blocks hormones that support a pregnancy, and misoprostol, which then causes the uterus to empty. According to the FDA, medication abortions are safe  until 10 weeks into pregnancy.

Surgical abortions conducted  during the first trimester  of pregnancy typically use a suction process, while the relatively few surgical abortions that occur  during the second trimester  of a pregnancy typically use a process called dilation and evacuation, according to the UCLA School of Medicine.

In 2020, there were 1,603 facilities in the U.S. that provided abortions,  according to Guttmacher . This included 807 clinics, 530 hospitals and 266 physicians’ offices.

While clinics make up half of the facilities that provide abortions, they are the sites where the vast majority (96%) of abortions are administered, either through procedures or the distribution of pills, according to Guttmacher’s 2020 data. (This includes 54% of abortions that are administered at specialized abortion clinics and 43% at nonspecialized clinics.) Hospitals made up 33% of the facilities that provided abortions in 2020 but accounted for only 3% of abortions that year, while just 1% of abortions were conducted by physicians’ offices.

Looking just at clinics – that is, the total number of specialized abortion clinics and nonspecialized clinics in the U.S. – Guttmacher found the total virtually unchanged between 2017 (808 clinics) and 2020 (807 clinics). However, there were regional differences. In the Midwest, the number of clinics that provide abortions increased by 11% during those years, and in the West by 6%. The number of clinics  decreased  during those years by 9% in the Northeast and 3% in the South.

The total number of abortion providers has declined dramatically since the 1980s. In 1982, according to Guttmacher, there were 2,908 facilities providing abortions in the U.S., including 789 clinics, 1,405 hospitals and 714 physicians’ offices.

The CDC does not track the number of abortion providers.

In the District of Columbia and the 46 states that provided abortion and residency information to the CDC in 2021, 10.9% of all abortions were performed on women known to live outside the state where the abortion occurred – slightly higher than the percentage in 2020 (9.7%). That year, D.C. and 46 states (though not the same ones as in 2021) reported abortion and residency data. (The total number of abortions used in these calculations included figures for women with both known and unknown residential status.)

The share of reported abortions performed on women outside their state of residence was much higher before the 1973 Roe decision that stopped states from banning abortion. In 1972, 41% of all abortions in D.C. and the 20 states that provided this information to the CDC that year were performed on women outside their state of residence. In 1973, the corresponding figure was 21% in the District of Columbia and the 41 states that provided this information, and in 1974 it was 11% in D.C. and the 43 states that provided data.

In the District of Columbia and the 46 states that reported age data to  the CDC in 2021, the majority of women who had abortions (57%) were in their 20s, while about three-in-ten (31%) were in their 30s. Teens ages 13 to 19 accounted for 8% of those who had abortions, while women ages 40 to 44 accounted for about 4%.

The vast majority of women who had abortions in 2021 were unmarried (87%), while married women accounted for 13%, according to  the CDC , which had data on this from 37 states.

In the District of Columbia, New York City (but not the rest of New York) and the 31 states that reported racial and ethnic data on abortion to  the CDC , 42% of all women who had abortions in 2021 were non-Hispanic Black, while 30% were non-Hispanic White, 22% were Hispanic and 6% were of other races.

Looking at abortion rates among those ages 15 to 44, there were 28.6 abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic Black women in 2021; 12.3 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women; 6.4 abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic White women; and 9.2 abortions per 1,000 women of other races, the  CDC reported  from those same 31 states, D.C. and New York City.

For 57% of U.S. women who had induced abortions in 2021, it was the first time they had ever had one,  according to the CDC.  For nearly a quarter (24%), it was their second abortion. For 11% of women who had an abortion that year, it was their third, and for 8% it was their fourth or more. These CDC figures include data from 41 states and New York City, but not the rest of New York.

Nearly four-in-ten women who had abortions in 2021 (39%) had no previous live births at the time they had an abortion,  according to the CDC . Almost a quarter (24%) of women who had abortions in 2021 had one previous live birth, 20% had two previous live births, 10% had three, and 7% had four or more previous live births. These CDC figures include data from 41 states and New York City, but not the rest of New York.

The vast majority of abortions occur during the first trimester of a pregnancy. In 2021, 93% of abortions occurred during the first trimester – that is, at or before 13 weeks of gestation,  according to the CDC . An additional 6% occurred between 14 and 20 weeks of pregnancy, and about 1% were performed at 21 weeks or more of gestation. These CDC figures include data from 40 states and New York City, but not the rest of New York.

About 2% of all abortions in the U.S. involve some type of complication for the woman , according to an article in StatPearls, an online health care resource. “Most complications are considered minor such as pain, bleeding, infection and post-anesthesia complications,” according to the article.

The CDC calculates  case-fatality rates for women from induced abortions – that is, how many women die from abortion-related complications, for every 100,000 legal abortions that occur in the U.S .  The rate was lowest during the most recent period examined by the agency (2013 to 2020), when there were 0.45 deaths to women per 100,000 legal induced abortions. The case-fatality rate reported by the CDC was highest during the first period examined by the agency (1973 to 1977), when it was 2.09 deaths to women per 100,000 legal induced abortions. During the five-year periods in between, the figure ranged from 0.52 (from 1993 to 1997) to 0.78 (from 1978 to 1982).

The CDC calculates death rates by five-year and seven-year periods because of year-to-year fluctuation in the numbers and due to the relatively low number of women who die from legal induced abortions.

In 2020, the last year for which the CDC has information , six women in the U.S. died due to complications from induced abortions. Four women died in this way in 2019, two in 2018, and three in 2017. (These deaths all followed legal abortions.) Since 1990, the annual number of deaths among women due to legal induced abortion has ranged from two to 12.

The annual number of reported deaths from induced abortions (legal and illegal) tended to be higher in the 1980s, when it ranged from nine to 16, and from 1972 to 1979, when it ranged from 13 to 63. One driver of the decline was the drop in deaths from illegal abortions. There were 39 deaths from illegal abortions in 1972, the last full year before Roe v. Wade. The total fell to 19 in 1973 and to single digits or zero every year after that. (The number of deaths from legal abortions has also declined since then, though with some slight variation over time.)

The number of deaths from induced abortions was considerably higher in the 1960s than afterward. For instance, there were 119 deaths from induced abortions in  1963  and 99 in  1965 , according to reports by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a precursor to the Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC is a division of Health and Human Services.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published May 27, 2022, and first updated June 24, 2022.

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many countries, especially in Europe

Nearly a year after roe’s demise, americans’ views of abortion access increasingly vary by where they live, by more than two-to-one, americans say medication abortion should be legal in their state, most latinos say democrats care about them and work hard for their vote, far fewer say so of gop, positive views of supreme court decline sharply following abortion ruling, most popular.

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