My search will almost always invariably start with PubMed/Medline. Other databases exist, but PubMed is by far the most accessible and serves well for most searches. You can use PubMed to search specifically for original articles, letters to the editor, clinical practice guidelines, review articles, meta-anlayses, and a whole lot more. The Pubmed website has comprehensive information about the database and how to search it. Their flash tutorials are fantastic and whether you are already familiar with PubMed searching or not, I highly recommend watching the following ones:
- PubMed Overview
- Searching Pub Med Quick Tours (5 tutorials)
- PubMed's MeSH database Quick Tours (3 tutorials)
- Getting Started with My NCBI
- Saving Searches
- Filters
The PubMed citation usually indicates if an article is available for free by putting a clickable icon on the top right-hand corner that reads something like "Free Fulltext Available." If it doesn't look like full text is available for free, click through to the journal site anyway if PubMed provides a link to it. Sometimes articles become available for free after a set period of time, and PubMed may not ahve the updated information. If it still looks like you have to pay, try going to the journal website and accessing the particulat jounral issue from there. Occasionally that yields different results than the PubMed click-through.
If you still don't get access to the journal article, you still have a few options:
- See if you can get the article through a local library
- Contact one of the authors or the press office at the institution where the article was authored to see if you can get a free copy fo the article
- Order (and pay) for the article online through the journal or its agent
- Order (and pay) for the article through a document delivery service like CISTI
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