In addition to the content that Robertson Library licenses, there are useful resources that are free to everyone to use.
Note: Open Access (OA) = free for readers everywhere
Keep separate the issue of identifying articles on your topic from ways to get the full text.
Why search more than one index? Why not just use the largest?
First, none of these are a subset of another.
Second, even where they overlap, relevance ranking algorithms and indexing methods vary a lot. Even though two free databases might have the same great match for your search, if one ranks it in the top 10, and the other puts it 500 citations down in the result list, you might never find it in the second one.
Discovery: Indexes to find what content exists on your psychology topic.
- Google Scholar (GS)- the largest free index to scholarly literature, with links to authoritative and sometimes other legitimate sites to retrieve the full text; indexes the paywalled (paid subscription needed for full text access) journals as well as the free/open access ones. It also offers "all # editions" where that article can be found on more than one site - one of those might be free (eg institutional repositories)
Note that in addition to keyword search, if you have a specific article title and want to find "more like this one", search for that title in GS, and use the "related items" feature. GS also has an excellent "cited by" feature to help you find more recent articles that cited the one you searched. - PubMed - the largest index of medical-related scholarly journals, including psychiatry and psychotherapy; provided by the US government's National Library of Medicine; links to full text including OA full text that is required by US law to be deposited in association with US research grants; links to publisher's copy may be paywalled
PubMed Clinical Queries is a special subset of PubMed that uses predefined filters to help you quickly refine PubMed searches on clinical or disease-specific topics, eg "therapy", "diagnosis", "prognosis" - CoRE - over 400 million items (mostly articles) including over 3 million in psychology, almost all are open access full text
- OpenAlex - over 250 million items, including over 500,000 in psychology; results may be free or paywalled
- Worldcat - The world's largest index (over 500 million titles) to published books in all formats, best way to find books on your topic but very few will be free/OA. It has some article indexing too but is not friendly about getting you to the full text.
Access: Ways to get full text (aside from the indexes above that also provide full text links) that may be free, or free to you even if you are not a UPEI current student. All of these will only take you to legal sources of full text.
- From the index - The above indexes will usually provide a link to the full text, either free or paywalled
- Because of Google Scholar's "all # editions", it can be useful to search for a specific article title that you found elsewhere using Google Scholar if you can't otherwise find a free source for the full text
- Unpaywall Browser Plugin - If you are viewing a citation to a paywalled article, this plugin will give you an icon if it knows of a free version somewhere else (eg a preprint, institutional repository copy, etc.); it is very effective at finding those
- Visit UPEI/Robertson Library - almost all of our full text content is licensed to allow us to share with anyone physically on our campus. Visit the Service Desk to get the weekly guest wifi password for our network
- Interlibrary Loan (ILL) - all members of the PEI community can get community borrower privileges including Interlibrary Loan service. This means that if you want an article that is paywalled, you can submit a request to get the PDF for free in most cases. Typically takes a couple of business days.
Free Full Text Evidence Based Practice Databases:
Cochrane Library - systematic reviews (full text summaries) and other evidence-based tools; it is not free for the whole Internet, but users anywhere on PEI (or NS, NB, and NL) can use it for free directly (you must be on a device that Cochrane detects is using an Atlantic province IP address); be sure to use the "(free within Atlantic Provinces)" link, not the UPEI link
Health Evidence - over 10,000 quality-rated systematic reviews evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of public health interventions, including mental health
PubMed Clinical Queries - really just a special filter of the larger PubMed but this can help get to focused clinical research; subject to the same issues about full text availability as PubMed generally (see above)