F.I.R.S.T. Tutorial

Chapter Five: Finding Articles in Magazines and Journals
In this chapter: Defining scholarly journals; understanding general and subject-specific databases; understanding citations; finding full text

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Getting from the citation to the article

So, you have the list of citations. How do you find the article?

Academic Search Elite contains many articles in full text. This means that the entire article is online in the database. You can tell if an article is full text from the citation list. Look for the words "HTML Full Text" or "PDF Full Text".

The following illustration shows an example of each of these alternatives.

fulltext

What is the difference between HTML Full Text and PDF Full Text?
Basically it's just how the article looks. HTML Full Text is formatted like a web page. PDF Full Text looks like the original publication. In general it's better to use PDF Full Text when you can because it makes citing the article a lot easier. PDFs usually also reproduce pictures and other visuals better. HTML's have hyperlinks.

Can I print the article I want? Can I email it to myself? Can I save it to a disk? Can I save it to my U Drive or desktop?
Yes to all the above! Look for the Print / Email / Save links at the top of the screen to take advantage of these capabilities.

Why aren't ALL the articles available in full text?
The reason why full text is or is not available in an index is usually an issue of economics. The makers of Academic Search Elite must purchase rights to provide the full text for articles from the original publishers. Perhaps the rights were not available. Perhaps the cost was too high. Perhaps a certain journal was less popular than others in the index. It does NOT mean that the "better" articles are full text!