I am so annoyed... I found a really useful set of articles and my university hasn't subscribed to the full access so I can only get the tempting abstracts... RAGH! They don't hold copies in the library either. This always happens!!!!

do u want to post author and title and see if anyone here can get it for you?

I have to agree this is so annoying. It's something I wish I'd considered when applying to places for PhDs - some unis just have much better libraries.

actually it is always the article that appears to hold the key to some really useful stuff that is elusive isn't it? sometimes the little abstract isn't enough to give you enough info to decide you want it, you ask for it, wait for it to arrive...and then find it isn't as good as you thought it was going to be. Happens all the time. However it is a good idea to post the details on here - or sometimes putting it into a search engine can get you the whole thing, I've managed to get articles that way before now.

This happens to me alot. However, if you dig around on Google (the abstract page itself might even have it), you can usually find the email address of the author. In which case email them saying a little about what you're doing, how interesting the abstract sounds and whether they'd be so good as to email you a PDF of the paper. I've done this many times, and everyone I've asked has always emailed them to me (and sometimes their more recent papers as well). Also a chance to network. Give it a go!

thanks for all your suggestions everyone! I was thinking of either emailing our subject librarian or doing what sylvester suggested and emailing the person directly as I have found their uni webpage and it all looks pretty promising! If I have no luck in those places, I will post it up and see if anyone is kind enough..

The online journal system at my university does not always give accurate information as to whether a full text article is available, sometimes it says it is, only to find out that its not, and other times, it says there is no full text article, but in fact, there is. I usually google the article title and author, if the library system does not indicate access, and try multiple web searches on both google and google scholar to see if there is another means of access.

Logging in directly to some of the sources, such as Ingenta or Heinonline, Wilson, Ebsco, etc. seems to be the best ways in some instances in figuring out if there is in fact full text access.