Finding Full-Text Articles
Use the Get it! Cornell links wherever you see them!
If you have citations for specific articles, check the Library Catalog to see if we subscribe to the journal that contains the article. The Catalog will show whether or not we have access to the electronic version and/or the print version. Note that this catalog also searches WorldCat, a database of library holdings from around the world. So if the Cornell library collection doesn't have what you're looking for, this catalog will tell you who does, and link you to Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan options (see below).
If we don't have it, we can get it for you for free in a few days! Request materials through Borrow Direct or Interlibrary Loan by clicking the Request Item button.
Reference librarians are here to help you - so please contact us with any questions!
Types of scholarly literature
You will encounter many types of articles and it is important to distinguish between these different categories of scholarly literature. Keep in mind the following definitions.
Peer-reviewed (or refereed): Refers to articles that have undergone a rigorous review process, often including revisions to the original manuscript, by peers in their discipline, before publication in a scholarly journal. This can include empirical studies, review articles, meta-analyses among others.
Empirical study (or primary article): An empirical study is one that aims to gain new knowledge on a topic through direct or indirect observation and research. These include quantitative or qualitative data and analysis. In science, an empirical article will often include the following sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.
Review article: In the scientific literature, this is a type of article that provides a synthesis of existing research on a particular topic. These are useful when you want to get an idea of a body of research that you are not yet familiar with. It differs from a systematic review in that it does not aim to capture ALL of the research on a particular topic.
Systematic review: This is a methodical and thorough literature review focused on a particular research question. It's aim is to identify and synthesize all of the scholarly research on a particular topic in an unbiased, reproducible way to provide evidence for practice and policy-making. It may involve a meta-analysis (see below).
Meta-analysis: This is a type of research study that combines or contrasts data from different independent studies in a new analysis in order to strengthen the understanding of a particular topic. There are many methods, some complex, applied to performing this type of analysis.
Off Campus Access to Full Text
If you're off-campus and want access to full-text, you can either go to the resource via the library website or use the hand PASSKEY tool. Using either method, you will be prompted to log in with your netID and password to gain access to our licensed resources.
Useful Databases for Health Administration Literature
- PubMedOne of the most comprehensive and up to date sources for scholarly literature in the biomedical sciences. Provided by the National Library of Medicine. Includes MedLine.
- Web of ScienceChoosing "All Databases" allows you to search an index of journal articles, conference proceedings, data sets, and other resources in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.--About Google scholar.
- EconLit with Full TextAbstracts, indexing, and full-text articles in all fields of economics, including capital markets, country studies, econometrics, economic forecasting, environmental economics, government regulations, labor economics, monetary theory, and urban economics.
- CINAHLCINAHL provides indexing for 2,913 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health. The database contains more than 1,000,000 records dating back to 1981. Offering complete coverage of English-language nursing journals and publications from the National League for Nursing and the American Nurses' Association, CINAHL covers nursing, biomedicine, health sciences librarianship, alternative/complementary medicine, consumer health and 17 allied health disciplines. In addition, this database offers access to health care books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of practice, educational software, audiovisuals and book chapters. Searchable cited references for 1,150 journals are also included. Full text material includes nearly 70 journals plus legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments and clinical trials. In March 2009, the content of the Pre-CINAHL database was incorporated into the CINAHL database.
- Sociological AbstractsAbstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Provides citations from 1963 to the present, and abstracts since 1974, to journal articles, conference papers, books, and dissertations. Subjects covered include community development, culture and social structure, demography and human biology, environmental interactions, family and social welfare, health and medicine and law, religion and science, social psychology and group interactions, welfare services, and women's studies.
- Nexis UniProvides access to full text resources on topics including current and general news; business and financial information; newspapers; company directories; government and politics; medical and health topics; accounting, auditing, and tax; federal and state laws; legal cases; and regulations. Resources include TV and radio news transcripts.
Searching Databases
Most databases allow the use of AND, OR and NOT to broaden or narrow and search.
- AND will narrow the search to include only records with both terms.
- OR with broaden the search to include records with either term.
- NOT will narrow the search to exclude records with one of the terms.
Truncation: You can use an * at the end of a word stem to broaden your search to include related terms. For example, to search for child, children or childhood use the search term child*
Putting quotes "" around words allows you to search for a phrase. For example, searching language development, without quotes, finds records with both the word 'language' and 'development' somewhere in the record. Searching "language development", with quotes, only find records with the phrase "language development".
Example: How does bilingualism affect language development in children?
NOTE: When you begin doing advanced searching in a new database, look for the Help or Information sections to determine how that database works, and how it may differ from other databases with which you are familiar.
The value of citation searching
An excellent way of discovering new and relevant resources is to use the articles that you have already identified as important works in you search. The articles and resources in the references or bibliography can point you to other relevant sources that were published prior to the article of interest.
But how do you find more recent articles that have used and cited the article of interest in their work?
Web of Science is a database of scholarly literature that also tracks citations and allows citation searching. In the search results window you can:
- sort by Times Cited to find the most important works on a topic
- view the articles citing this work by clicking on the hyperlinked number next to Times Cited