Skip to Main Content

Finding Free Health Sciences Literature

Leaving Pitt?

Are you graduating or leaving Pitt soon? Depending on where you're off to, you may not have access to as many journals or databases as you do at Pitt. This guide will help you find high quality free literature.

Open Access

Open access (OA) means that a paper or journal is available online to read for free, without a subscription. An entire journal may be OA, or a journal may have some articles that are OA and others that are behind a paywall. There are different types of open access - some journals ask the author to pay a publishing fee, while others get outside funding and will publish articles for free. Many OA journals are peer reviewed and very highly regarded.

Want more info? See HSLS's Guide to Open Access

Preprint servers

Many fields have begun using preprint servers. A preprint is a paper that has not yet gone through peer review. Since the peer review process can take a very long time, some authors choose to upload their papers to these servers, so that other researchers can benefit from the study. You may be familiar with arXiv, the important preprint server for physicists that has been around since the 90s.

PubMed

PubMed is a free resource from the National Library of Medicine, so you will always have access to it. Many of the articles in it, however, are subscription based. Once you graduate it may be hard to find articles that are freely available. PubMed provides a Free Full Text filter to quickly direct you to articles you can read for free. Run a search as usual, and then click the Free Full Text filter on the lefthand side of the screen:

Free full text limiter in PubMed

Clinical Queries

To use Clinical Queries, enter your search terms and then choose a specific filter (diagnosis, etiology, etc.). You can decide whether you want a broad or narrow search. Once you get your results, click "see all results in PubMed," and then filter the results using the Free Full Text filter.

Need help with PubMed?

Agricola & PubAg

Agricola is the USDA's agriculture database and the National Agricultural Library's catalog. Use it to access literature about animal and veterinary sciences, earth sciences, agriculture, and more. However, this is just a citation database, so you may  not be able to access full text.

PubAg is also from the USDA and has over 300,000 full text articles and over 3 million citations. Like Agricola it covers animal science, agricultural, and earth science literature.

You can search them both in one interface.

ClinicalTrials.gov

ClinicalTrials.gov is a clinical trial registry from the National Library of Medicine. Search by disease, keyword, or country and filter results by status (including  recruiting, not yet recruiting, ongoing, or completed), funder type, eligibility criteria, and more. Each record includes information about the PI, general information about what's being studied, and eligibility criteria. Sometimes the records will include results and adverse events as well. 

ERIC

ERIC is the US government's education database, and is free to access. Click the "full text available on ERIC" box underneath the search bar if you only want to see what you have full text access to without a library subscription.

Europe PMC

Europe PMC is a repository of life sciences articles, abstracts, and preprints from around the world. It also includes patents, NHS clinical guidelines, and a grant finder that searches for grants from the 29 agencies that support Europe PMC.

Genetics Home Reference

Genetics Home Reference (now part of MedlinePlus) is a resource that helps people understand their genetics, DNA testing, and different inherited health issues. While it is aimed at consumers, there is quite a bit of information for clinicians well including links to studies in PubMed and records in the OMIM database, which is catalog of human genes.

Hinari

Depending on where you are in the world, your institution may be eligible to access Hinari, a low cost (or free!) database of journal articles that otherwise require subscriptions. Hinari comes from the World Health Organization.

Science.gov

Science.gov links you to research funded by 13 federal agencies including NASA, Department of Health and Human Services, USDA, and the CDC. Filter by author, topic, and date. You can also find information on the agencies' requirements for data management and public access plans.

HSLS Resources

Remember to take advantage of Pitt while you're here! You can download (and keep) EndNote, and you can also attend a variety of HSLS classes to help you with everything from searching PubMed to data management.