AHIMA Library Research Resources
Obtaining full-text of what you find
What are the different options?
Finding Full Text Free Online
One of the first places you should check is PubMed Central, a digital archive of online journals housed by the National Library of Medicine. The Journal list allows you to see what titles are available and for what years. If the title is not available through PubMed Central, the next best place to look is on the publisher's web site. Occasionally, publishers make available specific articles or special issues of their journals. Another thing you might try is to see whether the author of the article you are looking for has a personal web site. Sometimes you will find links to articles posted there.
Note: here are some of resources I found that are not in PubMed Central, but are available free online
AMIA Symposium 1998-2003 (AMIA Symposium papers from 2003- are available through PubMed Central)
Informatics in Primary Care looks like there is a 1 year moratorium
NEJM available after 6 month moratorium
Highwire Press (Stanford University)
Free Medical Journals
Directory of Open Access Journals
Document Delivery
If you are unsuccessful finding the full text of an article for free via the Web, you need to decide whether time or money is more important as you track down articles. Most publisher sites allow you to purchase access to specific articles but the cost is usually high. There are also document delivery services where you can order articles over the web. See a list of some document vendors below.
Interlibrary loan
If cost is more of an issue than time, you should check out the interlibrary loan services of your local library. Most university and medical, and some public libraries provide these services for free. Some medical libraries that are part of Docline®, the National Library of Medicine's document delivery service allow users to set up accounts to use Loansome Doc. If you are affiliated with a medical library in the NLM system, you may want to pursue this option.
Directly from publisher
The list of core HIM journals provides links to publisher web sites. Some of these provide their content without a fee and most others will allow access to full text for a fee. You can search or browse by subject for publications indexed in PubMed. Click on the NLM ID in the individual journal record to find a link to the publication web site.
Document vendors
Additional resources for obtaining free full text:
Free biomedical literature resources from the NLM
Journals that submit final published articles to PubMed Central
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