Can reference retrieval not suck?

April 25, 2008 5:51 PM

Is there a (free) application/widget/method to automate the process of retrieving academic articles from university's online access to journals?

The way it works now is I will be reading usually a pdf of an article that will cite a particular reference, say Nature volume x etc. To retrieve that reference I have to navigate to my university's library's webpage, search for the journal title, log in through the University proxy, and then on the journal webpage I have to navigate through the volume/issue listings to find the particular cite.

Anyway to make this not suck?

posted by norabarnacl3 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I think a tool like that has to be provided by your school -- a number of colleges and libraries offer a customized version of the (very handy) LibX plugin, which pretty much does everything you're asking about. At MIT, our version also automates the proxy process for journal access.

Also, just as a cautionary note -- about a year ago there was a story (which quick googling isn't finding, sorry) of Harvard cutting off a student's access entirely after they discovered him mass-downloading journal articles; they suspected he was creating an offline duplicate archive. It sounds like you're on the up and up, but figured a word of warning was in order anyway.
posted by range at 6:36 PM on April 25, 2008

Range is right, your library/university would have to make such a thing available, since there are so many variables involved with licensing academic resources. LibX is what we use as well. You might try setting up your preferences in Google Scholar to include your school's name. If they're using a link resolver like SFX, you may have some luck going from the citation in scholar to the real deal. Your profile doesn't say where you are, if you want to mefi mail me the name of your school, I can check your library's website and let you know if there's some service there you're just not recognizing as a tool that could help you.
posted by donnagirl at 7:39 PM on April 25, 2008

Thanks guys. LibX is exactly what I had in mind and it turns out just adding my uni to Google Scholar works just as easily.
posted by norabarnacl3 at 8:02 PM on April 25, 2008

Which school are you affiliated with? Mine offers a bookmarklet that I can click on when I'm visiting Nature, JSTOR etc. which redirects me back to the article after I have logged in with my campus account. It's about as painless as it gets.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:02 PM on April 25, 2008

What I do is login to my university's version of Google Scholar. Instead of scholar.google.com, this turns out to be scholar.google.com.ezp1.universityname.edu . When I go there it first asks for my ID and password, then brings me to what looks like the normal google scholar page. But! Every time I search for a paper and click through to the journal website, I'm already logged in.

You can find the specific address for your school by going to the University library website and looking for google scholar among "electronic resources" or some such. Alternatively, you might notice that when you access most journal websites through your school account, there is a similar bit being appended to the URL (such as ezp1.university.edu), and you can try just adding that manually.

I've even written a bookmarklet that adds this bit automatically to the address of a site you're currently on. You can try modifying it so that it matches what your system does! (Note that as is it surely won't work, since "university.edu" doesn't actually exist...)
posted by wyzewoman at 6:28 AM on April 26, 2008

Oh, the point of the bookmarklet is that if you find yourself at a journal website somehow without first going to Google Scholar -- for example, by clicking on some citation somewhere -- you don't need to go back through Scholar to get the logged-in version of the page.
posted by wyzewoman at 6:29 AM on April 26, 2008

OK, yeah, what I'm describing is part of the functionality of libx (specifically the "reload page with University access" bit.) Cool! But unlike libx, my bookmarklet works on Safari. :-)
posted by wyzewoman at 6:32 AM on April 26, 2008

Zotero. For sites without a translator of their own, Generally type a decent section of the title into Google Scholar use that to get the reference into Zotero and then use my uni library's openurl resolver (setup from scholar preferences) to get the fulltext.
posted by singingfish at 2:42 PM on April 26, 2008