| Jack K. Williams Library |
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While we begin to implement SFX, you may encounter some problems or surprising results. Here’s a list of some of the things we know you may encounter.
What is SFX?SFX is a tool provided by the TAMU Libraries that creates shortcuts to the full text of online articles, as well as links to other library services. The name SFX is an abbreviation for “special effects” and was chosen by the company that designed this tool. When you see SFX in an electronic resource, simply click on the button to see a menu of options for the citation of interest. These options may include:
• Links to the full text of an article regardless of the content provider
• Automated searching of the library catalog for our print or electronic holdings SFX saves you time - you no longer need to write down a citation and then go to the catalog to see if the Library owns the publication. SFX does the work for you! What do the SFX menu options mean?After you click on an SFX button/link, a new window will open with a menu. Only options available for a specific item will display. Options may include: Click here for full text from…: Request this item through deliverEdocs: Check for this item in your
catalog…: Click here to report a problem with this
resource: AskNow Virtual Reference: This provides a link to AskNow, a trial of a real-time, chat-based virtual reference service provided for affiliates of Texas A&M University System schools. Click here for information about this journal from ulrichsweb.com: Ulrichsweb.com is a bibliographic database providing detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative information on serials published throughout the world. Among other things, it indicates if the journal is peer-reviewed and the publisher’s URL. SFX is available to all users and guests on Texas A&M University (College Station, Galveston, BCD) campuses, and to current students, faculty and staff of Texas A&M University from off-campus. From where?On campus: Off campus: Do I need a password to use SFX?Not on campus, but.... Off campus, you will need to authenticate on My Portal using your NetID user name and password. How do I use SFX?Many databases are SFX-enabled. Start a literature search in any SFX-enabled database appropriate for your subject. You will find the SFX button/hyperlink adjacent to the individual citations at the search results screen or at the full record screen for a citation. Simply click on the SFX button/hyperlink. A menu of available options for that particular article/book record will be displayed in a new window. How do I get to the full-text online version of my journal article?To access the full-text online version of the journal article, click on the following SFX menu choice: Click here for full text from __________ Sometimes an article is available from more than one database, such as Ebsco or ABI/INFORM. You can choose either database to access your article. If one is temporarily not working, make another choice. What if the full-text online article is not available through SFX?Choose one of the other service options available on the menu. Here are brief explanations of the other options: Check if this item is available in your catalog Not available online or in your library catalog? Request this
item through Interlibrary Loan Services For assistance: via e-mail, contact the TAMUG Public Services Librarian; via phone, contact the Public Services Librarian @ 409/470.4568, or other staff [Phone/Personnel Directory]. If in the Jack K. Williams Library, please consult the nearest Library staff member. Why are there multiple links to full text?The University Library may subscribe to an online publication from more than one source. The various options are included on the SFX menu to provide you with a choice. Different sources may provide different formats and different coverage. For example, some may provide a PDF (reprint) format, and others only plain text. Also, if one online version is not working, try other options. When you are unable to access the full-text article that is indicated, go to the SFX menu and choose “Click here to report a problem with this resource.” Using the form provided, be sure to check the box indicating the service(s) that you had a problem with. There is a box at the bottom of the form that you may check if you wish to be informed about the status of your reported error. After I click on the full-text option in the SFX window, the publisher's web site or database opens, but then I get an error message. Is there full text available or not?In the vast majority of cases, these error messages mean that full text exists at the publisher's site, but for some reason the SFX-generated URL wasn't accepted. When this happens, look for a search screen at the publisher's site and search for your article. Remember that you can always refer back to the SFX Menu or the original search session window for information about the article you are searching for. In a limited number of cases, the full text you need is no longer available at the site, but the SFX server doesn't know about it yet. In these cases you will not be able to access full text because it is no longer available from this resource. For very recent (within the past month) articles, sometimes SFX will assume the content has been loaded in a database when it actually hasn't yet. In this case, your best bet is to try again in a couple of days. Will SFX get me to all the electronic journals that the Jack K. Williams library subscribes to?No. There are several reasons a journal may not work with SFX, but the vast majority of them do. If SFX can't link to a journal, you'll be able to search our catalog and may find a link to the full text there. Why don’t I always go straight to the article when I choose “Click here for full text from…”?SFX gets you as close as it can to the full text of the article. Differences in publishers’ web sites and databases mean that sometimes SFX can only get you to a table of contents, a journal homepage with a list of available issues and volumes, or a publisher’s web site with a list of journals. At that point, you may need to navigate or perform a search to locate the specific article. In some cases, the closest SFX can get you is to the search screen of a database that contains the article, and you will have to perform a search to retrieve the article from the database. In other cases, the closest SFX can get you is to a list or menu of databases, one of which contains the article. You will have to look on the list for the database that the SFX menu says contains the article, enter that database, and then perform a search to retrieve the article. I click on the SFX link, but nothing happens and no window opens. Why is this?When you click on an SFX link, your browser needs to open another window to display the SFX information. If you are using a program such as Pop-up Zapper for Mac OS X, these prevent the browser from opening pop-up windows. Disabling this software should allow SFX to function properly. Why don't I see any SFX button/hyperlink in the database I am searching?The possible reasons are:
When the "Check holdings in LibCat / Chiron" link does not find anything, does that mean the Library does not hold the item?Not always. A manual search in the library catalog for the title of the book or the journal might find it. The Texas A&M University Libraries do not subscribe to all the titles indexed in each database, so you may find items listed which the library does not have. If you find that we don't have the journal you want, you can go to the SFX window and select “Request this item through deliverEdocs”, which will generate a deliverEdocs request form for you to complete. (Galveston and BSD directions) When I click on the full-text link, the article isn't there or I get an error message. What has happened?There are several possible reasons: There may be a temporary technical problem with the system hosting the full-text article. There may be a typographical error or wrong information in the citation. As SFX uses the citation information from the source database to build a link to the article, any incorrect information in the citation will make SFX unable to link properly to the full text. If this is the case, SFX may link you to the journal publisher's web site instead and you can then search for the article there. The link-to syntax used by SFX to build full-text links may be out-of-date because the publisher has made changes to its site. You may not be using a current version of your web browser software. You may use the "click here to report a problem with this resource" link in the SFX menu to let us know about the problems you encounter. What does the address "about:blank" mean?This is another Internet Explorer quirk. When you select a service that requires SFX to re-search the Web of Science databases, that address is displayed while the search is taking place. Once the results are displayed, the address (which is meaningless) goes away. Why does the number of options in the SFX window vary?When you click on I start my literature search in ProQuest databases. When I click on an SFX button in the search results list, I go to the article's citation page rather than the SFX menu. How can I get to the SFX menu?To view the SFX menu, just click on the SFX button that appears on the citation page. For all ProQuest databases, you must first view the citation page in order to link to the SFX menu. This may be changed by ProQuest in the future so that you can be linked directly to the SFX menu from the search results list.
I clicked on a menu option in SFX, but I don’t see anything, or the new window that I see is too small to read.When you click on a specific menu option, SFX opens it in a new window so that you can return to the SFX menu if needed. See if the new window is “hiding” behind another window on your desktop. You can resize windows by dragging the edges or corners with your mouse. SFX always opens a window for the SFX menu, and then a separate window for the full text or catalog search. Be sure to close these windows when you are done looking at the full text or doing a catalog search. When I go back to make a second selection from the SFX window, nothing seems to happen. What gives?This problem is limited to Internet Explorer. When you first click on an option in the SFX window, IE opens a secondary browser window on top of your open windows. However, when you make another selection, that secondary browser window does not get promoted to the top again. One solution is to drag the secondary browser window to another portion of your screen so it's not blocked by the SFX window. However, it could still be blocked by any other window (including the original search window, if you've moved it to the top), so you may occasionally have to go looking for it. If an SFX link to full text is not working, what can I do right away?If there is more than one full-text option on the SFX menu, try another one. Try clicking on the library catalog link from the SFX menu. A new window will open with information from the library catalog. If the information presented is not helpful, click on the “new search” link in this new window and try searching for the title of the journal or book. This second search might find it—for example, if we have a different edition of the book or if there is something wrong with the SFX link. Stop at a Library desk, contact AskNow for assistance, or report SFX problems by choosing “click here to report a problem with this resource” from the SFX menu. I click on the SFX link and I see the SFX menu start to display, but it never completes the menu. It just hangs there.This server burp seems to happen sometimes. Try closing the SFX Menu window, then click on the SFX link again. This usually works. The journal I want to view requires a password.A small number of the maritime medical and veterinary medicine journals do require passwords for access. At present, the password must directly requested. For assistance: via e-mail, contact the TAMUG Public Services Librarian; via phone, contact the Public Services Librarian @ 409/470.4568, or other staff [Phone/Personnel Directory]. If in the Jack K. Williams Library, please consult the nearest Library staff member. WilsonWeb databases are supposed to be SFX-enabled. Why don't I see the SFX link anywhere?Wilson, unfortunately, doesn't use either our image icon or permit us to use our own text to label to the SFX link. Instead they use their own icon for the link and call it WilsonLinks. Why do some Ovid citations have no SFX option?Some Ovid citations will not display any OpenLink(SFX) option. This is because some citations do not have all the elements Ovid requires in creating an OpenURL. This has been found in citations to supplements and some selectively indexed articles. The absence of an OpenLink(SFX) option does NOT necessarily mean that no full text or print is available for the citation. This problem has been reported to Ovid and we have requested that they change the requirements for generating an OpenURL. Sometimes when I click on the SFX link in Ovid I get an error message. Why?Links to SFX from citations to book chapters do not work (CINAHL and PsycINFO both index book chapters). Ovid has been told about this problem and we have asked them to fix it. I used SFX and then my session told me I had "timed out." I lost my search!Watch the time when you open an SFX window and start accessing full text. Ovid and some other databases are set to time out after 15 minutes of inactivity. If you look in the Ovid window behind the SFX menu, you will see that it keeps track of how much time is left in your session. IF YOU DON'T TOUCH OVID FOR 15 MINUTES, YOUR SESSION WILL CLOSE AND YOU WILL LOSE YOUR WORK. Why are there links to PubMed? It’s not a full-text service.In addition to being an indexing and abstracting service, PubMed is unique in that it provides access and links to the integrated molecular biology databases maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). These databases contain DNA and protein sequences, genome mapping data, and 3-D protein structures, aligned sequences from populations and the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM). PubMed Central is included because it provides access to more than 100 full text electronic biomedical journals. Other information resources which provide added value other than full text may be included in the future. Why don't I see SFX links in the Title Summary list for Web of Knowledge?Web of Knowledge only displays SFX links at the Full Record View level. You must select a record and view it to see the SFX button. Why don't I see SFX links in any of the Web of Knowledge records?When no SFX links display, there are two possible causes. The first is that you must let the first Web of Science screen fully load BEFORE you begin your session. If you are sure you let the login screen fully load before starting your session and you still don't see the SFX link, a second possibility is that you need to clear your computer's cache. (Is Netscape an option?)In Netscape, go to Edit/Preferences/Advanced/Cache and clear the memory and disk cache. In IE, select Tools/Internet Options and then under the General tab, select delete temporary Internet files. |
, the system runs through Texas
A&M University’s SFX database to see
what services are available for the volume of the journal in which
you found the article. What displays, then, are only those
services, which are available for that volume of that title.
We try not to offer you service options that aren't
available. |
Library Hours • Library Contacts • Privacy Statement Jack K. Williams Library, Texas A&M University at Galveston Website comments/suggestions • [updated: 10/23/2007] |
