My supervisor recommended I read the articles of a researcher but I can’t find those articles in full text anywhere, what should I do?
Answer
If you can’t immediately access the articles you need, there are a number of things you can do:
- If the items are not held in UL’s collections, you could ask your supervisor to provide copies of the articles
- Look up the person’s academic profile on ORCID to make sure that you have the ‘proper’ version of their name – they may have published under a different name at another time in their career
- Consult Microsoft Academic to see if the papers are listed there
- Look at the authors profile on their home institution’s website, most will list publications and if they are openly available they will have a link to them
- Find out what institution the person is working at now, and in the past, and look in the corresponding Open Access Institutional Repositories of those institutions, where they exist.
- Consider making personal contact with the researcher, via Research Gate
- If you can’t contact the person that way, consider contacting co-authors who may know how to get in touch with the researcher whose work you need. This may uncover additional material of interest for you also and expand your network of contacts.
The Library’s website contains a helpful page on alternative ways to find articles.