About
There are many sources for free full text articles and books.
Free Medical Journals
- Free Medical JournalsProvides a list of journals that include free full text or become free to the public after a period of time post-publication.
Digital Repositories
Online public digital archives of an institution deposited by scholars or publishers.
- eScholarshipCalifornia Digital Library's open access pre-publication and postprint materials, journals, and peer-reviewed series by UC authors.
PubMed
PubMed Central contains only free full-text. If you prefer, you can also search in PubMed@UCSF and filter your results to show free full text only.
- PubMed CentralPMC is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
- PubMed@UCSFMore than 23 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
Open Access Journals
Open access refers to freely available peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly articles available on the Web immediately after publication. Authors retain their own copyrights. For more information about open access, visit the Library's Scholarly Publication pages.
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)Access to over 2,000 free, full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
- PLoS (Public Library of Science)Access to peer-reviewed international journals that include PLoS Medicine, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Biology, and the soon-to-be-published PLoS Clinical Trials.
Books
- NCBI BookshelfBookshelf provides free access to over 700 texts in life science and healthcare.
Google Scholar
The Google Scholar search engine searches scholarly sources, patents, case law and more. It is a great adjunct to traditional article databases. It is quick and easy, always finds too much information but results are sorted by relevance. It is a great first place to look for information. You may answer your question or at the least get ideas about words to use in database searches. Scholar can also be the last place you look to turn up anything you did not find in database searches.
It is a good place to hunt for grey literature (that is, scholarly materials that are not in journals and might include white papers, dissertations, theses, and other documents).
Tips to create a better search in Scholar:
- Use OR between synonyms
- Put synonyms between parentheses
- Don't use AND
- Put quotation marks on phrases
Example:
Question: Is transversus abdominis plane block effective for pain after liver transplant?
