Searching for information: Accessing journal articles

You will often need to log in to access the full text of journal articles or ebooks because they are behind paywalls, and you can only access the full text by logging in with information that proves you belong to an institution that pays for a subscription to those specific resources.

To do this, find the option to log in via your institution and choose Queen Margaret University. This will look different on different ebook, journal and database platforms. For example, on the Taylor and Francis journals website it looks like the image below. You should click 'Access through your institution' and do not try to log in with your email and password in the boxes you can see initially.

Instead, enter Queen Margaret University in the box indicated:

You will be taken to the Shibboleth login page, where you need to enter your QMU username and password:

The QMU Remote Desktop service is available to all staff and students who require simple, fast access to our standard desktop environment, exactly as presented on our campus computers. The benefit of using remote desktop is that you do not need to individually log in to ebook, journal or database platforms and will already be logged into them so access is more straightforward.

To use remote access, follow the links and instructions on the QMU IT webpage.

• There are several different kinds of open access (freely accessible) resource. Some entire journals, or special issues of journals, are open access, which means all of the content in them is freely accessible without the need to log in.
• Authors often deposit a version of the article in their institutional repository (a database containing details of what has been published by employees of a specific academic institution and the full text of those outputs). These versions of the full text are open access and freely accessible. You can search these individually or use tools like Unpaywall and Open Access Button to find them.
• In other cases, individual journal articles have been made available by the author or the author's institution, by paying the journal an Article Publishing Charge (APC). In these instances when you follow a link to a journal article you will find that there is an indication that the article is open access, often with a gold padlock symbol, and you can see the full text of the article when you scroll down the page.

Unpaywall

Unpaywall is a browser plugin you can install that will pop up with a green open padlock when you visit a webpage where a peer-reviewed scholarly journal requires a subscription to log in. Although QMU subscribes to many journals, you will sometimes find that trying to log in via institutional login does not work, because we do not have a subscription to that particular journal (or sometimes we do, just not for that particular journal issue date). Unpaywall is a great way to quickly access a version of the journal article that is open (for example, an author's accepted manuscript in an institutional repository). It saves you the time of searching for an alternative version.

Unpaywall finds the kind of articles you'd see in peer-reviewed scholarly journals like Science or PLOS One, plus pre-publication versions of similar work from preprint repositories like arXiv. It harvests content directly from over 50,000 journals and open-access repositories from all over the world. 

Open Access Button

If you want to access an article that QMU doesn't have a subscription for, you can also use Open Access Button, either via their website or through a Chrome browser plugin you can install. When you use the Button, it will either take you straight to a free, legal copy of the research article or help you ask the author to freely share the article with you.

Sources include all of the aggregated repositories in the world, hybrid articles, open access journals, and those on authors' personal pages.

Open Access Button does not use content from ResearchGate or Academia.edu (which are sites people often share versions of articles they do not have the rights to).

You can connect Google Scholar to QMU Library, which gives you direct access to resources we subscribe to (for example, journal articles).

1. Access the Google Scholar settings page by clicking on the burger menu (three lines) at the top right of the Google Scholar homepage. Click 'Settings' at the bottom of the menu.
2. Select ‘Library links’.
3. Enter 'Queen Margaret University' in the search box, and select the search icon.
4. A list of libraries will appear. Select the check box next to the result, ‘Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh Learning Resource Centre - eresources @ QMU'.
5. Click on the ‘Save’ button.

Now when you search Google Scholar you may see a 'eresources @ QMU’ link next to articles in your search results. Clicking on this link will take you to the full text if the library has a subscription to it.