Choosing only articles provided in full text online
If you are working at home or in your office and can’t get to the Library, you might want to retrieve only articles that are available in digital format online. About 30% of the articles, book reviews and essays indexed in the ATLA Religion Database are offered in full text. For the rest, you will find citations only, and then you will need to hunt down those articles in print periodicals or books.
The digital material in ATLA Serials (ATLAS) is provided in several different formats, some of which are easier to open than others.
Below each record is either an Access now (PDF) button, Access Options drop-down button or a View details link. If the Access now (PDF) and Access Options buttons are missing, the article or essay is not available as a digital document, so the record contains a citation only.
Refining Your Results
Look at the options listed above the search results screen. You are offered several ways of eliminating records from your set and keeping the rest of them. Next to the All Filters button is the button Full Text. Click it.
Now, you notice that you have far fewer records. (Do bear in mind that you have eliminated a lot of potentially valuable information, which you might want to go back and read later.)
Different digital formats
If a record has the Access now PDF button, this link will give you direct access to a scanned copy of the article or essay just as it appeared in the original publication. PDF is a superior digital format for this purpose : it’s searchable by keyword, using the PDF file’s own menus. It can be listened to, saved or printed easily. And the links to PDF files are very stable, so you can email records to yourself with a high degree of confidence that you will be able to open the record and read the article later (the link typically remains active for a week).
If a record has an Access Options drop-down button, the options may or may not include a full-text option. Sometimes you will see only a Full Text Finder link. That link may send you to another database we subscribe to, such as Academic Search Complete. It may send you to the publisher’s own page for that article — some publishers will allow you to read the article or download a PDF, while others want to charge you for access. Examine the publisher’s page carefully for a link to a free digital document. If you don’t find one, don’t despair — we probably own the journal in paper format in the Periodicals stacks, or we can request it for you through Interlibrary Loan.
