Looking for Articles and Hitting a Paywall
Often, when searching for articles, you hit a "paywall". Paywalls are requests for payment for an article because it was not published in an Open Access environment or is only available through a paid subscription. Many times there are "pre-publication" versions in an author's institutional repository (the publisher allows the author to post an early version of the paper to drive up interest in the full published version), use those when possible.
Here are a list of databases that host / index many articles, but some are behind paywalls:
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.
This is a large index of some of what gets published. Not everything is linked to a copy of the article.
A comprehensive index to biomedical and life sciences. An excellent source for students in kinesiology and other health related fields. PubMed comprises more than 28 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
PubPsych is a free information retrieval system for psychological resources. It offers a comprehensive and balanced selection of resources from a growing number of international databases with a European focus, covering the needs of academic and professional psychologists.
PubPsych includes 2,095,901 datasets (Sep 2022) and offers, where available, full-text linking, links to additional information and link resolving.
When You Hit The Paywall
If you have searched our "Alumni / Free / Open Access" databases and still cannot find a free version of an article you want / need, then try one of these two options. They attempt to do the same thing, but are from different groups. They have scoured institutional repositories (University and College repositories of faculty research) and have indexed versions of papers. If you have the browser extensions on they will automatically try to match it with a freely available version. In some cases, they will provide, not the published version, but a "pre-publication" version of an article. Journal publishers will sometimes allow faculty to store / make available an early version of a paper that they will publish. In most cases, they are nearly identical. If you use a pre-publication version, and it is known, be sure to cite it as such.
A link to their website. Copy and paste the URL, DOI, or article title and see if it available for free from another website or institutional repository.
If you have found an article in Google Scholar, out in the open web, or even in one of our databases, but it isn't available, try OpenAccessButton. This website (also a Google Chrome extension) has thousands of articles available as Open Access (you can read it without paying).
A Google Chrome extension which will attempt to scour its own database and produce an available version of the document.
After you have added the extension to the Chrome browser, if it comes across a DOI to an article, it will automatically try to match it to a freely available version of the same article.
You now have two additional options provided by LibKey (a Third Iron company).