News & Blog

Our featured question this month is: “How do I find peer reviewed articles?”

There’s lots of options to use. In the center of the library homepage, you can use QuickSearch, search using the Articles tab, or the Database button to select a specific database that covers your subject area. 

QuickSearch searches many of our databases. Enter in your search terms, search, and on left side of the screen select Scholarly Journals/Peer Reviewed. This option does pull from all Libraries’ resources, not just articles.

The Articles tab works similarly to QuickSearch but limits the search to articles only with a default selection of “Full Text Online.” You can even limit by publication date.

Database search screens may look different. Look over the page to find the Peer Reviewed option.

We have a Peer Reviewed or Refereed Scholarly Journals guide that explains what peer reviewed and scholarly articles are and suggests databases used to find them.

You can view this short video from UCF Libraries “How to Find Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles” that contains what peer reviewed articles are and how to search for them here:

Our featured question for February 2021 is: “What do I do if the article/book I need isn’t available through UCF Libraries?”

Interlibrary Loan is the service for you!  Does your article have the Request Item/See Options link?  Have you searched the Books/Catalog for a title and it doesn’t come up in your search results?  If so you can use the free service available to UCF students, faculty and staff.  They can borrow a physical book for you from another library or get the PDF of an article.

The video that was here is out of date and has been archived. Click here to download the video for viewing.

For more information go to library.ucf.edu/services/borrowing-from-other-libraries/

Our featured question this month is: “Why can’t I log in to access online resources off campus?

Here are some options you can try:

• Use another browser
• Clear your cache and cookies
• Reset your NID password
• If you logged in through WebCourses and used Library Tools, try logging on directly through the library website instead
• If you are logging in from your workplace, you may be trying to access OpenAthens from behind a firewall.  Please contact your workplace IT to see if there is a work around

Tried all of the above and still having issues?  Please email our eResources team at eresourc@ucf.edu Provide the browsers you have used, the options you have tried and error messages you have received.

Welcome to the Libraries new blog topic: Ask A Librarian Featured Questions. Our popular virtual Ask Us reference service supports the UCF community from wherever they are located. It provides options for chat and text from the UCF Libraries’ homepage in addition to phone and email support.

The most asked question on Ask Us: “How do I open this article?”

This question comes to Ask Us staff largely through our most used mode of contact, our chat feature.  

When someone clicks on an article in a result list accessed through QuickSearch, there is a link to our chat widget “Ask a Librarian Chat” below the article record.

Taking a look, we can check the left side of the page and see which link is provided.

• Find Full Text – click this button and on the next page select the link: Full text from (database name). The database should open with the article information and a PDF link, if not, you can copy and paste the article title into the database search box.
  
• PDF Full Text – click this link and it will go directly to the PDF of the article
  
• Request Item/See Options – this link indicates that this article is not available through QuickSearch. Please note that not all of our Databases are searched when using QuickSearch. Click on the link and another tab will open with links to check other options. A good one to try first is “Search for (journal name) in Publication Finder” to see if we have access to the journal and year the article is from. If so you can click on the Database link that contains the article, and search for the article title in that Database. Another option to try is: “Search for this article title in Google Scholar” sometimes it may come up and have a PDF link to the right of it. If after this you cannot access the article you can click on the link: “Request this item through interlibrary loan.”  This will bring you to the NID login and then to the auto-filled request form. ILL will access the PDF for you from another library, this usually takes 3-5 days.

Make sure to visit Ask Us to ask questions about research, library resources, services, and policies. We look forward to assisting you!

The video that was here is out of date and has been archived. Click here to download the video for viewing.