Frequently Asked Questions

What do I do if the link I clicked doesn't open to the article I want?

In our Discovery Search, there is an option to report a broken link but this will not get you the article when you need it - it will simply report it to the library staff that the link you clicked did not work. If you want that article/eBook, make sure to follow the steps below.

1. Refresh the discovery search page you're on and try again. Sometimes the default database it was going to open will drop and a new one will take its place with a simple refresh of your browser.
2. When you click "View full text" in Discovery, it should open a new tab to the databse it expected the article to be in. It will likely say something like "Item not found" or something along those lines. Copy and paste the article title from Discovery and replace the text in the search bar of the database page that just opened. This will do a normal search for the article title rather than searching by ISSN or some other piece of metadata that could be incorrect and why you are not getting the results. 
   1. If you still do not get a result, try eliminating any hyphens, dashes, colons, or other punctuation in the middle of the title. That can sometimes throw off the search results if it is not exactly as the database has it.
3. If you still do not locate it, then try locating if the article is any other databases. To do this:
   1. Make sure you are on the Discovery page of the result where you clicked the red "View full text" button. 
   2. Scroll to the bottom of that page and you should see a section called "Access online".
   3. Under "Access Online" you should see a list of all the databases that article is indexed in. Click on a different one and try searching for it there.
4. If you still have not gotten the article/eBook, try searching Google Scholar for it and see if it is availabe as an open access (free) version from the publisher.
5. If you were not able to find it, please email us directly and let us know you would still like the article. We will likely have to do an interlibrary loan to gain access to it.

Why does this happen?

There are a number of reasons a link can be broken in Discovery. Sometimes it is just bad metadata from the publisher or a glitch in the system, but the most often occurance is when a publisher makes 1 or 2 articles freely available but not the rest in that journal issue. Discovery is not able to index by articles only, they index by the entire issue of a publication. Therefore, 1 free article means Discovery interprets that as ALL articles free in that issue and will then display them in the search results even though they are not accessible.