Finding Full Text Articles
There are two situations when you may be looking for full-text articles:
- when you have a citation and want to find the article itself, and
- when you have a topic and you’re searching the databases for full-text articles.
Citation Searching
If you have a citation (author, journal/magazine title, year, etc.), there are several ways to determine if UCF provides access to the full-text of the article. The availability of the full-text of electronic articles is constantly changing, so try a number of these different methods of checking before deciding to use Interlibrary Loan or giving up. See the section of this module on Interlibrary Loan for information about ordering an electronic copy of the article from another library.
Check the UCF Online Journal Subscriptions
To successfully use the Online Journals feature, you must be connected directly to UCF or have the EZProxy activated.
From the UCF Library Home Page, click on Online Journals. (The link will appear in the left column from the EZProxy’s “you have logged in successfully” page).
Enter the title of a specific journal and click Submit to see if it is available electronically.
Click on the title of the journal. On the next screen, Options for Getting the Full Text, you will see a list of databases that may provide the full text of your article. Click on the information about the article, such as year, volume, issue and/or pages. Scroll the table of contents of the journal for the title of your article.
To see all available online journals, click on Online Journals and choose a letter to browse journal titles.
Check the UCF Library Catalog
From the UCF Library Home Page, use the Basic Search box.
Type in the journal name.
From the pull-down menu, select Journal Title, and click on Search.
If found, look at the record to see if an electronic version is available and click on the hypertext link. If the source of the full-text article requires it, you must be connected directly to UCF or through EZProxy first for the hypertext link to work (see section of this module on Remote Access).
Check the Journal’s Internet Web Site
A publisher will sometimes provide full-text to a journal or to selected articles. UCF may also have full-text privileges from a journal’s web site and the information has not yet been entered into the catalog or online journal subscription list.
Use an Internet search engine (e.g., Google, Yahoo or Bing) to search for the journal title or the complete citation.
Database Searching
Library databases are organized collections of information that the library pays for and that can be accessed online. You must be connected directly to UCF or have the EZProxy activated to search a database.
When you are searching databases for a topic, and want to find articles available electronically in full-text, there are a number of features you might want to investigate that are part of the UCF Library’s web page or provided by databases.
From the UCF Library page click on Articles and Databases. You can access the databases either alphabetically or by subject. If you are not sure which databases would be the most useful for your subject, choose the subject guide.
Databases often provide options to limit your search. See the section of the module on Search Strategies. Limiting your search to “full-text only” is never recommended. The full text of many articles will be available to you by using the "Get Full Text" icon. Limiting your search to “full-text only” will, ironically, eliminate many articles available online.
Sometimes you can link to full-text articles within the database. Click on any links that say HTML full-text or PDF full-text. If you do not see a full-text option, click on the "Get Full Text" icon.
The “Get Full Text” icon is a bridge from the database you are in to other resources that the UCF Library buys that contain full-text articles. When you click on this icon, you are linking to any other resources the library buys that provide the full-text of the article of interest. Please note that the “Get Full Text” icon does not guarantee that full-text is available; it simply means that the option to search for full-text is available. Also, when you limit a search to “full-text only” in a database, you will be excluding all full-text articles available in other UCF Library databases. Hence, the warning: Never limit your search to “full-text only”! Use the “Get Full Text” to find the full text!
Get Full Text
The library buys the full text of thousands of journals from many different companies. If linked full-text is not available, click on the Get Full Text icon to see if the article is available elsewhere electronically.
The SFX (Get Full Text) box will open to display options for finding the full text of the article. If full text is not available, a link to Interlibrary loan (ILL) may be present for electronic PDF delivery, so make sure to sign up for a free ILL account (first time user registration) at http://library.ucf.edu/ILL/.
Example of a Full Text Option
Example of an ILL Option
