This video will demonstrate how to find and access articles using the University of Michigan Library Search. You can search over a half-billion articles from nearly 100,000 journals, newspapers, and magazines. Let’s start at the Library’s homepage at lib.umich.edu. Perhaps you are writing a paper and your topic is about Andy Warhol and TV. Type your topic into the search box and click search. You will see that you have results from the catalog, articles, databases, and more. Since you are specifically looking for articles, you will look only at the results inside the “Articles” column. Go down to the bottom of the Articles column and click on the option to “View all Articles Results”. On this page, you will see more results and now have options to refine them. You can use the options in the left column to refine the results such as limiting to only scholarly articles, excluding newspapers, selecting dates when the articles were published, or selecting a format or subject. Now, let’s select a result to get more information about that article. You will be provided with an abstract and other information, including author and publication. To see the full text of the article, click on the “Go To Item” button. You will be directed to the database where the article lives and you will be able to access the full text of the article. However, sometimes you may not be directly sent to the article when you click the “Go To Item” button. In this listing, we see that we are sent to another page called “MGet It”. Let’s click on the “Read Article” button to get to our article. Oops! It looks like this database was unable to direct us to the full text article. Don’t worry. If you run into this issue, you have several options. In this case, you can go back to the previous page and select another option to try to get to the article. Let’s try accessing the article from JSTOR this time. And this time we are able to access the full text. We can also resolve this issue by searching the catalog, requesting to have a copy delivered, or by notifying the library's link fixers.

And remember, if you get stuck or run into issues, you can always Ask a Librarian for further assistance.