Track Down a Citation

Use the Library to Get Past the Paywall

The library licenses access to many newspapers and academic journals: if you hit a paywall on the open web, the library's Journals search page can help you find the article using our licensed access.

If you are in a library database, you may see a button that says "FindIt@Harvard": click on this to start searching for the article in our online subscriptions and print holdings. Note: this search is only as good as the citation information it starts with, so if the citation info looks funny, you may need to troubleshoot the search yourself.

Go to the Journals search page

First, try searching by article title.

No luck? No problem! Just try again, this time starting with the journal title.

Note: after an article is published, it can take some time for the title to show up in HOLLIS+, even though we have full access to it. For some publications, individual article titles may never show up in HOLLIS+, even though we have full access to that publication. This is why it's good to know about searching by journal title!

Type the newspaper's title into the journal search box (in this case "journals" means any periodical publication, which includes newspapers, magazines, and academic journals).

 

You may need to choose from among several results---scan the publisher and dates to home in on our current subscription. (The longer a newspaper has been around, or the more common its title, the more results you'll see. This is because the library collects material from all time periods and from all over the world.)

Look for the "view online" link.

Once you click on it, you may see a list of possible access points. Choose the one that has the coverage dates you need.

Once you've clicked through, search for the article using a few unique keywords.

Why wouldn't you just paste in the article title? Because often the library's subscription database has a different title for the same article!