Evaluating PubGet: A Tool for Obtaining Full-Text PDF Journal Articles Quickly

This post discusses and evaluates the use of PubGet for quickly obtaining full-text PDF journal articles via institutional subscriptions.

Overview

PubGet is a free online tool for the life sciences which facilitates obtaining full-text PDFs. It was recently brought to my attention after I posted about using Google Scholar as a tool to facilitate obtaining journal articles.

Evaluation of PubGet

Coverage

To what extent does PubGet display the PDF when my University has access to the PDF? To evaluate the usefulness of PubGet I assessed whether it provided PDF access to a set of journals for which I knew my university (University of Melbourne) had a subscription. The following were the results:

Journal	Abstract Shows	PDF Shows
Journal of Applied Psychology	Yes	No
Human Factors	Yes	No
Cognitive Science	Yes	No
Psychological Science	Yes	No: Cookie problems
Human Performance	Yes	Yes
American Psychologist	Yes	No
Personality and Individual Differences	Yes	Yes
Social Networks	Yes	Yes
Australian Psychologist	Yes	No: Cookie problems
Organizational Science	Yes	Yes
Administrative Science Quarterly	only up to 2005	No
American Statistician	No	No

Thus, PubGet only connects directly to PDFs with a subset of journals that interest me using my University of Melbourne subscription. It provided access to abstracts for all psychology journals that I tried. However, when I ventured into statistics and business, coverage of abstracts was missing. The problem with the cookies could probably be resolved with some changes to my browser settings. Problem with access seems to be associated with the publisher providing the database. It's hard to say who exactly is at fault here: journal publisher, journal distributor, my library, or PubGet.

Citation Exporting

PubGet exports in RIS format. I could drag and drop this file into an instance of JabRef and import the citation.

RSS support

It facilitates the easy creation of RSS feeds related to search queries.

Conclusion

Coverage: Apparent reliance on PubMed means that many of the journals that interest me in business and statistics are not covered.
Institutional Integration: At present, the facility to directly access PDFs is not particularly good for my needs.
Conclusion: PubGet has some nice features and great potential. For researchers in the life sciences it represents a great option. If you know the journal is covered, it's a good means of accessing the full-text. However, for me, I will persist with my previously outlined Google Scholar Strategy for now.

Additional Resources

• Xconomy provides an evaluation of PugGet