Databases and Collections: More About Periodicals

Citations & Complete Articles in Our Databases

When you search our databases, you might find information about articles for which the actual complete article (sometimes called the "full text") is not available from the database. This is because the publishers of those articles have not granted permission to include them.

In these cases, the database will only show you the article's citation (the information that identifies the article and the journal it was published in) and often an abstract (a short summary of what the article is about).

Here is how articles with and without full text are retrieved in searches of our databases:

Primo

By default, shows you only articles it can provide full text for. You can turn on Expand My Results to show all the articles it knows about, whether or not full text is available.

EBSCOhost

When you search EBSCOhost, the results list shows you all articles it has information on, whether or not full text is available. For articles without full text in EBSCO, you can click the Find It button to see if it can find the article text in one of our other databases. You can choose to limit your search results to only articles with full text in EBSCO, by clicking on the Full Text checkbox, either on the search screen or the results list.

ProQuest

The Full Text checkbox is selected by default.

ScienceDirect

Shows you all articles, with or without full text. Click on the Subscribed Journals checkbox to limit your results to only articles with full text.

Obtaining Articles That Are Not in Our Databases

You have several options for obtaining articles from journals that are not full-text in our databases:

See our Digital Object Identifier guide if a DOI is available

An article DOI may be shown as a URL starting with "https//doi.org/10...".

Search for a library that subscribes to the journal

Search the Primo catalog for the journal name (not the article title), using the "All UH Libraries Catalog" option. You may be able to submit a request for a copy of the article online. You can also ask us to try to obtain a copy. You may also choose to visit the other library.

Search the Internet for the name of the journal

Some journals are available on an Open Access basis, where the publisher allows you to read articles for free.

Purchase an article reprint

Many journal publishers sell reprints of individual articles. However, these reprints tend to be rather expensive. The library will not cover this fee.

Some articles have a list of references at the end that shows the sources that the authors referred to in writing the article. You can use that list to further explore the topic you are researching.

To obtain an article you'd like to read, you can use Primo's Fetch Item tool to see if it is available in one of our databases. Note – this does the same thing as the "Find It" button in EBSCOhost's results lists.

If the article has a Digital Object Identifier in its citation (labeled with "doi:" or as part of a URL starting with "https//doi.org/10..."), see our guide on Digital Object Identifiers for how you can use the DOI to obtain the article.

See the Obtaining Articles section of this page for more options.