There is no control whether you have seen the cited papers officially or not. As long as you are sure that these papers contain the information you are citing, I do not see any problem.

Yes you can cite the paper if it is available on Google scholar

what exactly you need?

I have occasionally cited a paper based on what is in the abstract. But be careful doing this because there is often a lot in the paper that is NOT included in the abstract.

If you did not access the full text of an article, meaning lack of availability, you could cite it as an abstract from an abstract-indexing database (APA Style, 2020). You might have a look at reference example 6, fully cited below. That being noted, a frequent citation of abstracts is not recommended.

APA. (2020, February). Journal article references. https://apastyle.apa.org. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/journal-article-references#6

Good luck,

Rutraker.org has many journals in many fields of science. Try to access sites with scientific articles from university computers, access may be open. Contact one of the authors, and he will send you a publication, many do so - this increases citation and scientific acquaintance.

Check you question once again; if you have no access then you do not know about a paper and you can't cite it. When you read the source (it can be seen in a library, in Internet, at friendly university etc.) you may and sometime even you must cite it. Is you institution a subscriber of a given database or not completly never mind. Good luck.

Dear Ms.Vivanae Clay,

Greetings to you. You Can get the papers in the following ways:

1. Download the article which are open access from the journal itself.

2. Write to one of the authors of an article to send it. Definitely, they positively respond.

3. Ask your colleagues from other university/college who has access to the particular journal to download and send it to you.

4. Sometime, the journal opens out for free access of articles for a week or month. For this, register with the journal for updating the information.

5. Also, you can access the articles through Research gate, Academia etc. Researchers after the embargo period upload their work.

6. Sometimes, the articles of Editor's choice for free download are available.

Generally, there is no problem irrespective of how the article is accessed until the information cited are correct. Do not cite the article only by reading the abstract. Always, read the article completely and then cite it.

All the best.

Dr.N.Ethiraj

I think it is ok to cite a paper as you read the abstract only.

Yes

If your organization/institutional has access to a journal, then you can download the paper through institutional access and go through the paper.

I have seen several papers just taking over citations from other articles citing the original articles of mine.

I understand and share your frustration. I have done this at undergraduate level but would not recommend it post-grad and definitely not at doctoral or post-doctoral levels. At doctoral level there is an expectation that one will challenge research and opinion, and even re-analyse the data that a previous researcher has analysed. For example, take the Hawthorne effect and the number of papers, books and sites that discuss and reference the effect.

Don't cite the paper without looking at that. Doing so may cause severe mistakes sometimes.

I think its not a good practice to cite without proper reading.

You Can..But it would not be morally and scientifically a good idea because it could lead to misleading results.

At anyone still replying: As I said in my reply to the recommended answer and hinted to in my question a few months ago: I do have the full-text pdf and did read it all. I just didn't get it through the official journal page. This is my question: Can I cite the paper even though the journal could know that I don't have official access to it? Obviously, I don't cite something I didn't read.

Yes, you can.

I think it is fine to an extent, but we should only cite papers we have access to (in an ideal world). Of course, if the reader gets the idea and chooses to access the journal by himself/herself after reading your paper, then the problem is solved.

Regards.

What I feel is citing papers only by reading the abstract is not a good practice. Personally I have never done or do it in future.

But in doing so, no one is going to detect it or going to point his/her finger at you.

Citing papers you have never read is not going to put you into trouble because no one is going to do any policing on you. Only time you can face difficulty is if you have to defend your thesis in front of your examiners and if they detect something and question you only.

Yes, you can, If an article is published in a high impact factor  journal.

There are so many different ways to access a paper. You could read it in a library or request it through the Interlibrary Loan scheme, so there is no way for the publisher to tell where you acquired it from. I am in favour of open access, we should be sharing our research wherever possible, not always supporting the sometimes questionable journal owners into restricting access at sometimes exorbitant rates.

Dear Viviane Clay ,

Don’t worry. The publisher (or journal) will not check if you have access to a paper you cite or not. For multiple reasons:

-You might have access to the print version (through your library)

-You might have requested a full-text from the authors

-You might have received a copy from a colleague

-Even if they want to, they don’t have the manpower to check these kind of matters

-Last but not least it is, as you indicated yourself, a matter of ethics to cite only papers you actually read and know the content/message they represent

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon that people cite papers they never read (simply cite because other cite the paper as well). Even stronger some even cite papers that are retracted (and with a strong suspicion that this particular paper is not accessed recently, otherwise one should have noticed it).

So, good question but the comforting answer is that is perfectly fine.

Best regards.

Do not cite those articles to which access is not reachable. Always cite those article which you have read and in this way you can also justify your results.

As to me it's difficult to cite merely on abstract. You may be missed the entire message of the finding of the article viz parameters, soil conditions, treatments etc vs your finding.

Yes for sure you can still you accessed to it indirectly (using Sci hub) but the important thing that you got the information and you made the right reference.

Dear Viviane Clay,

I also agree with the Rob Keller's answer. It is necessary to access the papers by any means before citing them to avoid any misinterpretation. Sci-hub is a good tool to obtain the access for full papers at resource limiting situations. What is most important is, not to go for secondary citations, but to access the original articles somehow.

You can cite your paper if you are first author

You read an article A that cites an article B for a reason R. You can then quote article B for the same reason R by referring to article A. You then "trust" article A. Therefore, to be completely correct, you must also cite article A with article B to clarify your "source".

You then re-cite what has been quoted elsewhere in the same context and with the same reason given.

In my opinion, this is the only situation where you can quote the article without having read it.

Hi Dr Viviane Clay . Yes of course because from the abstract you can take information and cite the paper.

Sometime it is necessary to cite such a paper. Better to mention "not seen in original."

Without reading a paper, but only by going through the abstract one can cite such papers without being detected by the reviewers or the publisher. But my question is how ethical to do it?

Better access the paper and read through before citing. By just reading the abstract a lone, you are prone to make some misinterpretation or shallow conclusion. It is therefore preferable to first go through the key parts of the article including the methods they used, their results and discussion.

Dear Clay

The Journal, publisher, and author itself is more than happy if their work is cited. No need to panic no one will check your access!

Marvelous work....

It's not very "elegant" to quote a work that you haven't read.

Else, get the abstract or the paper or the salient features through secondary citations and then you can cite.

Cite but clearly say not seen in original as suggested by @Tapas Chakrabarty

First read and understand the full article it is more relevant to your work then go for citing the article.

In addition to Rob Keller and B. Mohammed-Azizi above:

If you intend to include a general reference to a review paper or a seminal paper (like the original CRISPR Cas paper by Jinek et al) I guess just having the abstract at hands will do.

However if you want to include a reference for a fine point or some specific conclusion I would not rely on just seeing the abstract information - which in many cases is too general, without the necessary differentiations or in some cases actually misleading. See B. Mohammed-Azizi above or try hard to get the full text to read: Researchgate requests being a good instrument for that, standard google searches as well - but I trust that you thought of going that road for yourself.

Another idea is to look for what the authors of the paper in question have published in other papers - sometimes similar content crops up in additional, accessible papers by the same authors.

Good luck for the detective work, but try to check on the full text before including a reference - this is the safest, most ethical thing for you to do as a scientist (bearing in mind that all other work is also written by human beings with all their deficiencies ...)

Great . This is a new idea. Very important. All the best .

It depends upon the situation , If you dont have access to that paper then you can download the paper form the proxy web server like SciHub , LibGen, Unpaywall , and one chrome based extension (Open Access Button). You can ask librarian of the university to do that things for you, or manage that paper for you. They have that responsibity to do these things for you. If you not able to download the paper then you can ask a friend, professor form other instution who have access to download that for you. There is one final soultion and i think every one agree for that : you can directly write an email to the corrosponding author to provide an electronic copy of your research and i am sure every one will be happy to give that.

If you try these things for that paper and still you are not able to find the paper then you can look for the relevant papers, references and try to read the terminology, and hypothesis they used to solve the problem , i am sure you can get an idea what the working methodology is all about in that perticular paper.

Now the question comes of citation then yes , you can cite that paper if you are sure that the research is authentic and published in peer reviewed jounral other wise you can skip and cite the other papers, look for the references also .

Thanks.

Yes, you can cite papers you don’t have access to. However, it is important to make sure that the citation is accurate and that you are not plagiarizing.