Finding Full Text Articles

OTseeker posts abstracts from articles listed in our database whenever possible. We do not provide full text articles. Full text of articles can be located through your institution’s library and through some public libraries, or through individual subscriptions to journals or payment for individual articles.

Professional/Student Affiliations

• Hospitals, universities, professional bodies and other institutions provide access to journal articles. If you have an affiliation with such an organisation, you may be entitled to access full text from specific journals, for example: Queensland Health employment enables access to Queensland Health Libraries
• Searching for an article through a medical library may result in a library icon being displayed with the abstract. If you are affiliated with the library, you can use this link to access the full text, or to find the journal in the library collection, example:  University of Queensland. If the article is not available, it may be possible to order the article through your library.

Public Library

• Public library collections sometimes include medical journals or can obtain article copies through inter-library loans, example: City of Sydney Library. Charges may apply.

OTseeker: Finding Free Full Text

Usually you would first try to locate full text of articles through your institution’s library, however not everyone has access to resources providing full text. We have therefore outlined a number of strategies below to help you locate articles that are provided as free full text.

Links on Detailed Search Pages of OTseeker

OTseeker posts abstracts from articles (when permitted by copyright) whenever possible and these abstracts often have hyperlink options added to them by the OTseeker team to help people access free full text articles if they are available.

Hyperlink options are positioned in the Abstract field at the base of the relevant OTseeker Detailed Search Results page. There are four types of links provided. These include:

• Full text link – OTseeker abstracts sometimes provides a link that redirects the user to the full text of the article. Full text may sometimes be available through Open Access journals, or from journals that may make past issues of their content available. See the OTseeker Journal Table: Full text availability of journals most commonly indexed in OTseeker for more information on full text availability (see below). For example, by searching OTseeker a citation for an article was located by Smeets et al (2006) called Active rehabilitation for chronic low back pain: Cognitive-behavioral, physical, or both?” OTseeker provides the abstract and link to the full text of this article at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2474/7/5
• OTseeker abstracts often provide a link to PubMed Single Citation Matcher.  PubMed is a free access bibliographic database that includes content from Medline and many other resources. The link provided at the bottom of the Detailed Search Results page in OTseeker takes you to PubMed’s citation matcher (see example in Detailed Search results screen shot below). Cut and paste the details of the article into this citation matcher to be taken to the abstract in PubMed. When free access is available for an article, Pubmed indicates this with an icon in top right corner of its abstract. Clicking on this icon brings you to the full text.
• Journal home page link –this link in abstracts on OTseeker redirects you to the home page of the journal. If the journal provides free text you may be able to locate the article by browsing the journal archive or current issue via the journal hyperlink. For example: By searching OTseeker, a citation and abstract for an article was located called “Systematic review and meta-analysis of therapeutic management of upper-limb dysfunction in children with congenital hemiplegia” by Sakzewski, Ziviani & Boyd (2009). In OTseeker provides the link to the journal that this article is published in: pediatrics.aappublications.org. By using the citation details to search the journal it was possible to access the full text for this article at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/123/6/e1111.abstract?sid=8479aaa4-56a9-4bb7-8a4b-92c1edc0a731
• Abstract link – redirects user to the abstract of the article (when the abstract it is not available on OTseeker). Occasionally these abstracts may link to the full text.

How to find Free Full Text Articles?

Below are several other methods to access free full text articles online.

Search Engines

Search for specific articles or journals by entering the article title or journal name into an online search engine. These sources contain links to some free text articles.

• Google or Google Scholar: freely accessible web search engines. Google Scholar indexes peer-reviewed journals, books and non-peer reviewed journals. Some of the articles may be available as free full text
• PubMed: A free access bibliographic database that includes content from Medline and many other resources for directions. If free full text of articles are available, click on full text available icon in the relavant abstract in PubMed to access the article.
• GetCITED: Freely accessible academic database, posting peer and non-peer reviewed items. Only members can add to and edit the database contents.

Journal Homepage

1. Search the FreeMedical Journals website at http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/ to find a list of journals that provide free full text.
2. Look at the journal titles commonly listed in OTseeker in the Journal Table below to see if they provide any free access to full text.
3. Use a search engine (eg Google) to find the journal homepage.
4. Browse the journal archive or current issue for article required, or use the journal home page search field.
5. Some full text articles are provided freely by the publisher. In some cases it is necessary to register as a guest before this option is available. Click on the PDF icon  to access the article.

OTseeker Journal Table: Full text availability of journals commonly indexed in OTseeker