Alumni: Searching for information

Library Search is DMU's main search engine and searches for books, journal articles and other materials held in the library.

Alumni are not able to access PCs in the library. However, Library Search can be accessed remotely, using the search box from the main library website.

Online material that is licensed to the university is not available to alumni or external users.

Some online material may be available in an open access format and can be found by:

• Using open access browser extensions to add to search engines such as Google Scholar
• Searching free online resources or repositories such as DORA (De Montfort Online Research Archive)

Find a list of other free online resources

Plugins are available that will automatically check for free copies of articles you've found online.

• Google Scholar button: If you find a citation for an article (but no link to the full text), you can click on the button to find out whether the article is available anywhere else.  
• Unpaywall:  This looks for articles that are open access or uploaded by the paper's authors. Whenever you come across a paper whose full text is freely available, a green open padlock will open on the side of the web page. 

All plugins are available for Google Chrome and for some versions of Firefox. They can be installed from the Chrome Web store and the Add-ons for Firefox page.