How To: Find the Full Text?

Use the Journal's Title to Find Full Text

It can be frustrating for a researcher to come across what is seemingly the perfect article, only to find that it is just a citation or abstract - full text not included.

Do NOT give up on that article, at least not without doing some further checking. We may have a subscription (print or online) or it might be free on the web. If all that fails, you can request a copy of the article from another library.

Online & Print Journals List

Your most important tool for locating full text is our Online & Print Journals List. This is a listing of all of the journals we have access to, which databases have them, and what dates are available. If you have an article citation and you want to find the full text, first identify the journal title. Search for that title in the Online & Print Journals List. It will tell you where you will find full text, if we have access to it.

Example: Searching from Within a Database

You've been searching for 'health benefits' and 'coffee' in Wilson's OmniFile database. Notice that the third article in your list of results does not list a link to full text. Instead, you see a green button:



This particular article is from the Wall Street Journal. By clicking on the Search for Full Text button, you are automatically looking up the Wall Street Journal in our Online & Print Journals List.



This page tells you that we have a print subscription to the Wall Street Journal, but that we only keep the most recent 3 months. The Wall Street Journal is also available in ProQuest Newspapers from 1982 to present, and in ABI/Inform from 1984 to present. The article we need is in the December 29, 2009 issue, which is available in both ProQuest Newspapers and ABI/Inform.

Click on one of these databases, and then scroll around until you locate the issue that you need - in this case, the December 29, 2009 issue. Once you've opened that issue, you'll get a list of all the articles that appeared in that issue. This list may be organized sequentially by page number or alphabetically by article title. Depending on how it is sorted, look for the page number or article title to locate the article on the health benefits of coffee.