The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is an open access research database that contains abstracts, working papers, pre-print articles, and published scholarship. Authors can post their own papers and abstracts to SSRN, and many of these papers can be downloaded free of charge. SSRN also distributes topic-based eJournals that publicize new scholarship across a wide variety of subject matter.
SSRN is a great way to discover new scholarship, find open access papers, and improve the discoverability and availability of scholarship
SSRN is free to use. Users can create accounts to post their own papers on the network and to download other papers and/or abstracts. Users can also subscribe to eJournals, but only some eJournals are available for free. Others are available for a fee.
Authors who create accounts on SSRN have profile pages that list all of the papers they have uploaded onto the network. Profile pages also include affiliation and email contact information.
Papers on SSRN are organized into different research paper series. Most legal scholarship is in the appropriately named Legal Scholarship Network (LSN). Institutions or individuals who subscribe to SSRN can register for fee-based eJournals. SSRN regularly distributes emails to subscribers of these eJournals about new scholarship that has been posted to SSRN.. Even without subscriptions, users can browse articles and abstracts that
are uploaded to the different eJournals.
SSRN provides several metrics about papers that are posted on the network. These include: total downloads, total citations, downloads per author, and citations per author. These metrics only include information about SSRN, so the citation count may not be the same as elsewhere.