20 May 2013

Milestone/More on Accessing Journal Articles

[An aside: This is my 2500th published post!  It has taken me 7 1/2 years to get to this point, but maybe I'll get to 5000 posts in less time since my daily posting rate has increased over the years!  At the same time, it's not so much about the numbers, but rather relevance and utility.  My sincerest hope is that these posts have proven useful to you and the valuable work that you do to assist and protect forced migrants.]

Now here's the actual post...

Last month, I provided some suggestions for how to find the full-text of journal articles when you do not have subscription or database access to journal collections through your institution.  One suggestion was to try to locate an article of interest via Google Scholar.  However, if you don't find anything in Google Scholar, broaden the scope of your search to include all of the web.  The reason is that it can take a little time for references to end up in Scholar's index, so information about newly published journal articles may not be available immediately.

Here's an example:  Today, the PDES Facebook page included a link to an abstract of an article entitled "Early relationships and marriage in conflict and post-conflict settings: vulnerability of youth in Uganda."  Full-text access requires payment, so I searched in Scholar for it but only found a citation.  However, when I expanded my search to all of the web, I located the full-text on the Women's Refugee Commission web site.  (As it turns out, the principal author is a WRC staff member.)

Likewise, the texts of the two law review articles I referenced in today's "gender issues" post are not yet in Google Scholar, but they are available online nonetheless.

If you give the suggestions in this and the earlier post a try but still cannot track down a certain article, let me know - I might be able to point you in the right direction, although no guarantees!

[Image credit: Spider Firework, Wikipedia]

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