Finding the primary literature Peat cites (and the papers behind claims made across this wiki) usually means getting past a paywall. This page covers the tools that make that possible, and what each one is actually for.

Public service through civil disobedience, such as Alexandra Elbakyan's Sci-Hub, might gradually break down the monopolies that have been created by the government for the corporations.

— Ray Peat[1]

Peat himself wasn't familiar with Sci-Hub by name as of a 2021 interview,[2] but the researchers who've spent years tracking down the studies behind his work depend on it. Danny Roddy describes pre-Sci-Hub research as emailing a friend at a university and hoping they'd send a PDF; post-Sci-Hub, papers he'd only ever seen the abstract of were suddenly readable in full.[3]

Sci-Hub

[edit]

Sci-Hub hosts full-text copies of paywalled journal articles, keyed by DOI (Digital Object Identifier, the permanent id every published paper gets, e.g. 10.1210/jc.2013-1056).

How to use it: take a paper's DOI link and paste it directly after a Sci-Hub mirror's URL:

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2013-1056

If the DOI isn't handy, Sci-Hub's own search box also accepts a paper's title, PubMed ID, or the direct publisher URL.

The JSTOR trick: JSTOR article pages are themselves built around a DOI. Pasting a JSTOR article URL directly after a Sci-Hub mirror often works the same way as a DOI link:

https://sci-hub.se/[JSTOR article URL]

Sci-Hub has stopped indexing new papers since early 2021 due to legal challenges in India,[4] so it's most reliable for papers published before that date. Mirror domains change periodically as old ones get seized or blocked; search "Sci-Hub mirror" for a current one if a given domain stops resolving.

Anna's Archive

[edit]

A broader shadow library covering books as well as journal articles, including a lot of what Sci-Hub doesn't (post-2021 papers, textbooks, out-of-print books). Search by title, author, DOI, or ISBN. Useful as the first fallback when Sci-Hub comes up empty.

Internet Archive

[edit]

Hosts full scans of out-of-print books, old newsletters, and archived web pages (including dead sites via the Wayback Machine, useful for raypeat.com pages that have moved or old forum threads that have gone offline). Not focused on journal articles the way Sci-Hub/Anna's Archive are, but often the only source for older or out-of-print material.

JSTOR

[edit]

A major journal archive, mostly humanities/social science but with real overlap into nutrition and older medical literature. Free registration gives limited free reading (100 articles per 30-day period as of 2026); full access requires institutional login or payment.[5] When a paywall blocks a JSTOR article, the Sci-Hub trick above is usually the faster route.

PubMed

[edit]

Not a full-text source. PubMed indexes abstracts and metadata (authors, journal, DOI, publication date) for essentially all biomedical literature, not the papers themselves. Use it to find a paper's DOI and confirm you have the right study before chasing down the full text elsewhere. A meaningful fraction of PubMed-indexed papers do have a free full-text link directly on the PubMed page (marked "Free article" or linking to PubMed Central); check that before reaching for Sci-Hub.

References

[edit]
  1. ↑ Ray Peat, "Culture, Government & Social Class," 2016.
  2. ↑ Ray Peat, interview on LSD/serotonin/PUFA, 2021: asked directly "Sci-Hub, S-C-I-H-U-B, basically the pirate website to download articles" and replied "Oh, okay." Georgi Dinkov (Haidut) on the same call: "Ray, getting some of your references is like an investigation of many months... Without Sci-Hub, I wouldn't be able to find anything."
  3. ↑ Danny Roddy, Bioenergetic Helpline #4: "Once Sci-Hub came out, that was like a revolution in the ability to read papers... now it's Anna's Archive."
  4. ↑ Georgi Dinkov (Haidut), "Doxycycline can CURE melanoma in humans," 2021: "I cannot get access to the full study as Sci-Hub has stopped indexing new studies since the beginning of 2021 (due to legal challenges in India)." haidut.me
  5. ↑ JSTOR, "Open and Free Content on JSTOR", about.jstor.org, accessed 2026.