HighWire Press

ASBMB Today, March 2002
Find Full-Text Articles, Free and Fast

[Last month, ASBMB Today introduced the new "portal" site from Stanford's HighWire Press, which allows you to search all of Medline plus 300 journals' full-text at once -- including the JBC, of course! This month we begin a series of short articles highlighting important tools or features of this new site for researchers' sore eyes. The new site is at http://highwire.stanford.edu ]

The search result page in the new HighWire portal contains much more information and function than other sites' search result pages. This month, we'd like to look at how the page helps you spot the full-text articles to which you can get immediate, online access.

Take a look at the search result for "chromatin organization" (Figure 1) and notice the text under the journal cover next to each citation. You'll see that HighWire now tells you which articles are

free to you - because your institution has purchased a subscription and provides access for you
free - because the publisher has made the article free to anyone on the internet
available for purchase - you can pay with a credit card and get the full text immediately online

If there is no indication under the cover, then you will need your own personal subscription to gain access... or maybe a trip to the library!

Figure 1

As always, readers of HighWire-based full-text articles also get free access to the full-text of articles that are cited in over 300 other HighWire-based journals, whether or not you or your institution have a subscription. So from any JBC article, you can link immediately to cited articles if they say [Full Text] in the online reference section.

HighWire hopes these accessibility-indicators will help busy researchers select articles for which they can be assured of getting full-text access online. If you are interested in knowing which HighWire-based journals your institution has subscribed to, click on Institutional Subscriptions on the new HighWire home page; if you are interested in which journals make back articles free to the world, click on Free Back Issues on the home page; and if you are interested in which journals' articles are available via online purchase, click on "Pay Per View" on the home page.

And even when the full-text article is not online - JBC full-text articles back to 1980 are now online, but many journals go back only to the mid-1990s or so - the [Abstract] link that is available will give you access to more than just the abstract. For example, you can see a list of full-text articles that have cited that article, and link to those articles easily. So there's a good reason to visit the abstract page in the HighWire site, even if you think you might have already seen the abstract in PubMed.

Next month we'll look at some of the other features of the search result page that will help you speed your literature review.