Chemistry Research

In your research, you will likely run across articles and books that you would like to learn more about.  Sometimes you'll find what appears to be the perfect source in the "Works Cited" or "Bibliography" of a paper you're reading, or someone on the Internet will mention a study or experiment that was published in a specific journal issue. 

This is a Known Article. To use the resource, you need to obtain the full-text of the document. But how do you determine if the Library has a copy of it?

A possible approach would be to type the title into One Search or one of our bigger databases.  Unfortunately this may not yield a definitive result. 

The better way would be to use Journal Finder to determine if we have access to the journal and for which date ranges we have full-text.

If you are taking classes from other colleges or universities, don't forget to check their library resources as well.

Search Journal Finder.

MCC subscribes to a variety of databases and the journal coverage between these databases varies by title and date range. You may find that one database only indexes a particular journal (provides the citation information and an abstract only) while another provides the full-text articles. Searching Journal Finder will help you determine if the MCC Libraries provide electronic access to a particular journal and which database provides that access. Simply search on the journal title and Journal Finder will list the databases that provide access along with the range of coverage.

Google and Google Scholar

Google - https://www.google.com/

Google Scholar - https://scholar.google.com/

Tip - Google the full title of the article both with and without double quotes.  Look for the author's website or the website of the author's institution.  Frequently pre-publication copies of papers can be found outside of paywalls.

ResearchGate

https://www.researchgate.net/

Tip - ResearchGate is a Facebook-like social network for researchers. If one of the paper's authors is a member, you can request a copy of the publication entirely within the app.  It is also a way to engage in conversation with active researchers in many disciplines.

Open Access Helper

https://www.oahelper.org/

Open Access Helper is designed to make finding the best Open Access location easy. Whenever it comes across a DOI, it will query the APIs of unpaywall.org & core.ac.uk to see if an Open Access copy is available elsewhere.

Open Access Button

https://openaccessbutton.org/

Tip - Open Access Button is a browser add-on and website that looks for free sources of papers by title or DOI (Digital Object Identifier).

Unpaywall.org

http://unpaywall.org/

Tip - They claim to have access to over 48,000,000 free scholarly articles harvested from all over the web.  They also offer a browser plug-in.

Seriously...