Philosophy

You have a citation and try to find an article, but there's a snag somewhere. Here are some things that might be happening:

1. You're off campus, but not using the VPN to log onto the campus network.
2. We don't subscribe to the journal at all.
3. There are multiple databases with different dates available for the same journal.
4. We don't have older issues online.
5. We don't have newer issues online.
6. The Findit@PUL database is just wrong.

1) You're off campus, but not using the VPN to log onto the campus network. Every online journal we subscribe to is authenticated by Princeton IP address. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. Just follow the instructions for setting up the VPN and you'll be fine.

2) We don't subscribe to the journal at all. Hey, it happens, even at Princeton. You can get the article you want through INTERLIBRARY LOAN, and if the journal is really important for your field you can REQUEST A SUBSCRIPTION.

3) There are multiple databases with different dates available for the same joural. You get a page like this and click the first link without reading the options. It can be confusing. One journal, four choices, different coverage. If you want an article from this journal before 1992, or the most recent year, clicking the top link won't work. 

4) We don't have older issues online. The journal below is available only from 2008 to the present. It's also not available in print in the library, because we never subscribed to the print version. (It's possible we get this subscription free as part of a big journal package sometimes known as a "big deal"). 

5) We don't have newer issues online. We have online issues of the journal below for 1954, but never for the latest year. That's probably because the journal publisher still publishes a print edition, and doesn't want the digital access provided by the vendor (e.g., Ebsco) to eliminate print subscriptions. We most likely DO have the current issue in print.

6) The Findit@PUL database is just wrong. The Findit@PUL database interacts with the thousands of full-text databases the library subscribes to and tries to link you from a database without the full text of an article to a database with that full text. That database depends on information from publishers, and sometimes that information is incomplete. They add or drop titles without telling us, so that it looks as if we have something online we really don't. (There are also times we have things online that it seems we don't.) It's complicated.