Did your college or law school have a massive periodicals collection, 100+ research databases, and a discovery layer* to help you find them? Those were the days, am I right? While larger law firms and corporations often have robust information resources plus tools for surfacing them, many organizations just have an intranet page or a library catalog to guide users to a variety of sources that must all be searched separately. So, how do you find that periodical article amongst all the possible resources? Here are a few suggestions:

• Ask your organization’s information professionals. Your librarians will have an excellent grasp of the sources available to you and will offer guidance about your internal and external resources and free and fee-based options.
• Check your primary research resources (Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, EBSCO, ProQuest, etc.) Most plans have ample secondary materials including journals, law reviews, and other periodicals. You might be surprised to discover that scientific or medical article you need in the source you generally use for case law.
• Try Google Scholar. If it says, “All 11 versions”, for example, take a look at them. It will surface fee-based sources but you will often luck out and find a free copy. Unclick the box for citations if you’re only interested in full text.
• Create a ResearchGate account for access to scholarly research. Some authors post copies of their work. It’s a good place to share your own publications, too. Another similar approach: check the authors’ faculty profiles at their academic institution. They may have posted links to copies of their publications.
• Use the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The specific journal article you want is probably from a big for-profit publisher, but you might find similar articles from open access journals that will meet your need.
• Check .org and .gov sites with an interest in your topic. For example, the CDC, CMS, FDA and many other federal agencies and national nonprofits generate scholarship and they often share their research.
• Check WorldCat for a periodical title to see if a nearby library holds the journal you need.
• If you need to order items regularly, set up an organizational account with a document delivery service like WTS or DartDoc, for example, for reasonably priced access to journal articles.

*Wondering what a discovery layer is? In libraries, it’s a meta index that allows users to conduct a single search across the library catalog plus all of the other information resources and databases to which the organization subscribes, surfacing items regardless of their source or material type.