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PubMed @ UMSL

Step-by-step guide to PubMed's basic and advanced features, with downloadable handouts.

Full Text Links

In PubMed @ UMSL, you have a better-than-average chance of finding free Full Text articles associated with the citations because

  • UMSL purchases subscriptions to journals and allows students, faculty, and staff to access the journals free of charge
  • Many journal publishers use PubMed Central (PMC) as their archive; PMC includes thousands of journals comprising more than 6 million full-text articles
  • If UMSL Library does not have access to the article, we can request it through Interlibrary Loan at no cost to you

In Summary view, you will see a Free article or Free PMC article link whenever free full text is available. However, UMSL may also have access to articles that don't display such a link. For instance, both of the articles in the following image are available as full text through UMSL Libraries; it just took a bit more searching to find the first one.

Citations for two articles: one not free, one free

In Abstract view, button-style links are used, making the source of the articles clear at a glance. The first one listed is usually from the publisher website and may or may not allow unpaid access to the article. For that reason, always try UMSL Article Linker or PMC Full-Text links first. 

Two full-text links for an article: one reads "Elsevier full-text article" and one reads "UMSL Article Linker"

Clicking on the UMSL Article Linker button will pull up a new page. In the middle of the page, you will see a blue Full Text Online button when UMSL offers access to the article. If you don't see a Full-Text link, it's possible a librarian can find it for you in one of our databases or in our collection of printed journals. When these avenues fail, however, you can submit an Interlibrary Loan Request via the blue button or the Request ILL link on the right side of the page. You will usually receive an email with a PDF of the article within a few days. If you don't receive an email, check your spam folder.

Filtering on Full Text Availability

To reduce some of your frustration, it may be worthwhile to filter your results so you only see articles that are available in Full text or Free full text.

 NOTE  Provided you've built time for research into your schedule, you have choices!

  • The Free full text filter will more or less guarantee access to free articles, but the trade-off is that you will see far fewer results.
  • The Full text filter will give you a moderate number of results and may still include a lot of free articles not caught by the other filter.
  • Recommended: Applying no text-availability filter will pull up all relevant results, and the librarians and staff at UMSL Libraries can work to get you what you need.