Getting Started in Grad School: 4.4 Accessing Your Research

When exploring and searching for research in your field of study, you will be assessing resources from various sources, some of which may not be freely available (i.e. behind paywalls) or are unavailable through the library. You may also be looking for strategies for managing and organizing your ever-growing personal library of research sources. 

By the end of this section, you should be able to access and organize your research more effectively and efficiently. Begin by exploring some library research productivity tools to help with this process.

When conducting your research you want to ensure you have seamless access to the resources available to you. Access to electronic resources (databases, e-journals, and e-books) is determined by licenses the library signs with publishers. These subscriptions permit current USask students, staff, and faculty to access e-resources off-campus. 

Here are some tips and tools to ensure you have easy access to the resources you need.

To connect to any website through the USask proxy, install the USask proxy bookmarklet in your browser for quick access. If you are searching and encounter a paywall, simply click on the USask Proxy link in your bookmarks bar and the page will automatically reload to give you access to the full-text version if the library subscribes to it. You will be prompted to login with your NSID and password if you are not already logged in. 

If you are a Google Scholar power user, you will want to customize your settings to ensure you have access to licensed content whether you are searching on- or off-campus.  Google Scholar has a built-in tool that allows you to access full-text search results through the USask proxy. To enable this tool in Google Scholar follow these three easy steps.

When you search Google Scholar, if the library has access, you will now see Fulltext @ USask Library on the right side of your list of search results. This link will take you to the full-text version via your USask library account. These preferences will be saved for all future searches on that computer. 

Alternate Access to Articles: Using Unpaywall

Unpaywall is a browser extension (for Chrome and Firefox) that alerts you to freely available and legal content (published and pre-prints) from repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as publishers' open content.  Unpaywall offers alternate access to articles and makes it easy to find articles available for free. This guide discusses the Unpaywall extension in more detail, including installation instructions.

While the University Library has a comprehensive collection of scholarly literature across disciplines, we simply cannot have immediate access to everything. However, our interlibrary loans (ILL) service connects you with materials from other libraries when we do not have what you need in our collection, free of charge to the USask community.  This is an invaluable service for researchers to access materials they may not normally have access to.