I haven't used it in anger yet, but I think Semantic Scholar only searches databases that give you free access to the PDFs - so if you want to know you'll actually be able to click through and read the article, that's an advantage over Google Scholar, which will bring citations which are paywalled or unavailable online as results.

I believe also only searches (fairly) respectable databases like ArXiv and PubMed Central, so you are less likely to get poor-quality results.

Thanks! I can't recommend Sci-Hub or I might have my librarianship license revoked! But that archive looks really interesting.

Thanks! I really didn't want it to be boring and dry, and I'm not on here a lot so I though having a face to put to the blog would help.

How thorough you need to be absolutely depends on what you're working on - obviously if you're writing a literature review for publication you need to do a bit more due diligence than if you're just looking for the next thing to read. I would recommend Semantic Scholar as a more finely-tuned alternative to Google Scholar while still having a lot of free content.

Thanks for flagging this up - I think I've fixed that now.

Hi, I'm planning a post on finding relevant literature (I'm a librarian), as well as using reference management software to save time. Does anyone have any great suggestions for places they go for academic writing on EA-related topics, or for datasets? I'm thinking things beyond Google Scholar/Arxiv/JSTOR. All input valued.

I'd just like to say that this is the first month I've made an effort to read the EA Newsletter, and it has been a hugely rewarding experience. Although I'm not sure I'll get through everything on there before the next one, it's really highlighted loads of great writing and speaking that I would not otherwise have sought out.

I don't know about dedicated people being better at recruitment. I have found my friends to be more receptive to me as a 'softcore EA' because we can relate to each others' lifestyles easily and they are more likely to make small changes than large ones. If I donated a really high proportion of my income (say 50%), I think I would not talk about that with them as they would find it instinctively off-putting to consider such a large change. I actually don't talk about the pledge at all with them unless they already seem keen for fear of sounding too 'hardcore'.

Of course, maybe if you're super dedicated you're going to try and recruit more often and with more people, so you may have better results. My point is just that I think 'softcore' may be more relatable for non EAs and that can be good to start conversations.