On 25 Oct 2006 at 14:35, Paul Okami wrote: > I've been associated with UCLA for my > entire research career and have no idea how > unaffiliated researchers who > do not live near a good university library (or are homebound for other > > reasons, such as disability) do their research--that is, gain access > to full-texts of online research articles from professional journals.
> Are there commercially-run databases out there which > you can subscribe to > and will license articles to you? I think it's possible to get quite a bit of what you need without access to restricted databases. For research published in the last few years, all you need is the author's e-mail address, and that's usually easy to get (e.g. by checking at the author's university, or in abstracts of the author's work provided by the journal or on PubMed). Once you have the address, an e-mailed request usually produces a pdf within a few days, sometimes within a few hours. In addition, many journals give free access to issues older than 6 months or a year, and the open access movement is spreading. And when all else fails, you can always ask a better endowed colleague (I mean with journal access!) to help. The main problem would be old literature (say 10 or more years ago) where commercial databases are usually no help anyway. That's where you have to have access to an inter-library loan service or visit a university which holds the journal. But generally, I think one can do pretty well with what's available for free and what you can get by asking. Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Department of Psychology Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 0C8 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
