The MSU Libraries subscribes to thousands of electronic journals. Journals not available electronically may by available in the print collection. To ensure access to these journals, it is always best to look up articles through links on the libraries website. If you are off-campus, you will usually be required to log in with your Net ID and Net Password.
EXAMPLE ONE: You see the following in a reference list, and you want to read the article.
| D'sa, E. J., Korobkin, M., & Ko, D. S. (2011). Effects of Hurricane Ike on the Louisiana-Texas coast from satellite and model data. Remote Sensing Letters, 2(1), 11-19. |
Step 1: Enter the article title into the Discovery search box on the library's homepage and click on Search.
Discovery searches many of the library's research databases at once. When searching by topic, this can lead to many duplicate results, but it is great for finding specific articles.
Step 2: If you do not see a direct link to the full text, click on Find It.
Step 3: If the library has electronic access to the article, then you should go over to the publisher's website or a page in another database that has the full text.
EXAMPLE TWO: You are searching a library database for information about your research, and you see the following result, which you want to read.
| Tharmabala, T., & Nowak, A. S. (1987). Mathematical models for bridge reliability. Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, 14(2), 155-162. |
Step 1: Whether you are in Discovery or some other dabases, click on the Find It button, if available.
This is an example from the Scopus database. When trying to get the full-text of articles from Scopus, the "View at Publisher" may take you to the full text, but the Find It button will do a more comprehensive search of the library's electronic journal availability.
Step 2: If a direct link to the full text is not available, click on "Search Library Catalog by ISSN Number."
Step 3: There may be two records for a journal in the online catalog. Since Find It determined that the article was not available electronically, click on the record that has the green print journal icon next to it. In this example, the article we need is from 1987, and the catalog record below shows that the library does have it in print.
Step 4: If the article you need is not available electronically or in the library's print collection, you can request the article through the library's Interlibrary Loan service. Before requesting an article through Interlibrary Loan, you may want to search Google and Google Scholar to see if it has been posted by the author.
Note that faculty, staff and graduate students can also use the Interlibrary Loan system to request articles from our print journal collection (up to 1,000 pages per fiscal year without charge).
