Where to find old papers, articles and preprints? Question: How can I find physics papers, articles and preprints decades ago?
Description: The search of articles and papers is for the purpose of finding interesting phenomenon for a science project. Where can I find a website where physics papers, articles and preprints in the 80's or older could be found?
 A: If you're looking for specific papers then you should be given where to find them, in particular the name of the publication. In order to read most of these you have to pay, or be a member of a University, as a professor or as a student, say. Then you will probably have access to them via the subscription paid by the University.
For some particular examples the author may have a free copy of the paper in his/her website. However this is not the general case, as far as I can tell.
A: For high energy physics, start first by searching the arxiv.  Sometimes old papers show up there.  Then look on INSPIRE (previously known as the SPIRES database).  Search results from INSPIRE feature links to various websites may be found.  The most useful such links are usually marked 'KEK'.  The Japanese accelerator laboratory KEK has an archive of scanned papers.  It's not comprehensive, but it has a lot of stuff -- especially more highly cited papers.  Also, it's free, which is wonderful if you're not at an academic institution with a large budget.
