Getting the Full Text of Articles
Some articles are published in Open Access Journals meaning that they are publicly available and you don't need a Cornell affiliation to access.
Some articles are published in journals for which Cornell has a subscription, which means you have free access.
Some articles are published in journals to which Cornell does not have a subscription, but you can get those articles for free through Interlibrary Loan services.
This section of the guide explains different access options.
GetIt! Cornell
Databases often provide direct access to the full text of an article through a link to the full text or to the PDF of the article.
If the database does not provide full-text directly, click on the Get it! Cornell link to see if there is full text access through another source.
Interlibrary Loan Services
Sometimes you cannot access the full text of an article (usually because Cornell does not subscribe to the journal or has not purchased the resource). If this happens, take advantage of Cornell's Interlibrary Loan Services.
Register on the Interlibrary Loan site and then submit a request -- providing all of the required citation information.
The Interlibrary Loan staff will send your request to affiliated libraries that own the journal and, in most cases, you will receive the article in your email within several days. There is no charge to Cornell students, faculty and staff for this service.
Passkey
If you are doing research off campus (as everyone is doing these days), you can access many articles by going through the library catalog or through databases. If you choose to do research using Google Scholar, you will not automatically be taken to the full text of articles. Sometimes, you go to the publisher's page and are informed that you can access the article if you pay a fee.
To avoid having to pay a fee, it is recommended that you install Passkey into your browser. Then when you hit a roadblock to access (the library world calls this a paywall), you can just click on the Passkey icon and it changes the URL of the article and allows you to access the content for free. Of course, this only works if Cornell subscribes to the journal!
Consult the library guide on Passkey for more information about installation.