Yale Links is a full text direct linking service provided by the Yale University Library. The "Yale Links" buttons appear in various databases (e.g. Medline, PubMed, CINAHL) to which the Library subscribes. (Click here to see if your favorite database is Yale-Links-enabled.) You can use these buttons to quickly locate online full text of the articles without leaving the databases. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use the Yale Links services to locate the full text of journal articles.

Scenario

We will continue to use the scenario in the tutorial "Verifying Citations Using Single Citation Matcher". We have verified the citation in that tutorial and have landed on the PubMed record page for the following article:

Hasson, GK. Inflammation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease. N Engl J Med. 2005 Apr 21;352(16):1685-95. 

Where do I find the Yale Links buttons?

Depending on what database you are searching, the "Yale Links" buttons may appear in different places of the database. They can appear in a search result list, or they can appear in the full database records for articles, or both. For example, in PubMed, these buttons appear only in the full database records for articles: 

You may have noticed that besides the "Yale Links" button, there are sometimes other buttons (often publisher icons) providing full text linking services in PubMed. These buttons are not Yale-specific -- they may or may not link to a full text provider the Yale Library subscribes to. If Yale Links could not locate subscription-based online full text for you, you might also want to try these publisher icons to see if they link you to the full text for free, but in most cases, you will want to click on the Yale Links button.

The Yale Links Service Menu

A new window pops up when you click on the "Yale Links" button. The bibliographic information of the article is displayed at the top of the page.

Each of the bullet points below is a service provided by Yale Links to help you locate the full text of the article. If Yale Links finds that online full text is available, the full text provider’s name and link will show up in the first bullet point. For example, in our case, Yale Links finds that online full text of the article we are looking for is available from "Highwire Press Massachusetts Medical Society". We can click on the “GO” button to access the full text of the article on the full text provider's website.

Normally, full text providers also have the full text of the article in PDF format for you to download. For example, in our case, you can download the PDF of this article from this provider's website:

Why is Yale Links sometimes unable to find full text?

Although Yale Links can find online full text most of the time, there are times when it cannot. There can be many reasons for this to happen. For example, certain online full text providers have not yet been indexed by Yale Links, so Yale Links does not "know" the existence of these providers. Therefore there is still a good chance that the Library has the article online even if Yale Links reports that it cannot find it.

Additionally, Yale Links only reports if it can find ONLINE full text of the article. If you are looking for older journal articles that might only be available in print format, that information is only available through the library catalog.

For instance, in the example shown below, Yale Links reports that it cannot find full text online for the article. In such a case, we should proceed to the next options on the Yale Links service menu – check the Library’s online catalog (Orbis) – just to make sure that the Library really does not have them.

One of the advantages of Yale Links is that it can do automatic searches in the Orbis catalog, eliminating the need for the user to perform those searches separately. All you need to do is to click on the "GO" button beside it:

This is the Orbis search result. We can see that Yale Library does have online access to the article. We can then click on the link provided on this page to go to the full text provider’s website to access the article.

What if the Library really doesn't have the article?

If both an online journal search and an Orbis catalog search could not find the journal in which the article is published, you can proceed to the next option on the Yale Links menu to use our interlibrary loan service. Please see the "Interlibrary Loan Via Yale Links" module of this tutorial for detailed instructions.