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Off campus access to databases

Access to PubMed

PubMed is a free service.

That means using it and searching its contents is available for everyone. It doesn't require a subscription and, therefore, login. It acts as a gateway where articles are collected from a variety of sources and leads to the full text of the publications on the publishers' websites.

Accessing the Full Text

PubMed itself might be free but that doesn't mean the full text of the articles is available on the same terms. To access the full text, look for the Full text links section in the page of the article you are interested in.

From there, you can choose the link that will take you directly to the article page in the publisher's website (in this case the publisher is Elsevier).

You will then have to sign in to see if you can have access through the University of Dundee. This process is slightly different among publishers, but in general you can look for:

  • Institutional login
  • Log In via your Institution
  • Shibboleth login
  • UK Federation Access Management
  • UK Higher Education

Then you will be asked to provide your University of Dundee email and password. Once you have signed in, you should be redirected to the article page. There, you should notice that the "Purchase" (or other publishers' equivalent) has been turned into "Download". Also, it's likely that somewhere in the page it is mentioned that access is provided by the University of Dundee.

There is a chance, however, that the "Purchase" option does not turn into "Download" after you sign in. That means that the Library does not have access to that article. What you can do in this case, is apply for an Inter-Library Loan (ILL), so we will try to get the article from some other library that has access.

(Please note that the pictures above outline the procedure for full text access from one specific publisher. The procedure might be different for other publishers. You can have a look at the other databases mentioned in this guide for more help. If you encounter difficulty, please don't hesitate to contact us.)