Half-question/half-rant: I used to be able to use a VPN client provided by my institution to be able to connect to journal sites directly and get the articles that I need. Now that has been discontinued and I need to go through the library web site to look for the stuff I need. It will take more than double the time and I won't be able to do anything from my mobile anymore. Is this a widespread phenomenon? Are universities moving away from providing VPN access to journal sites for some reason?

@Zeta.Investigator you should make a MWE and post it on tex.se. I am not sure I would advise doing it, but I bet you could hack \ifciteseen and a custom field with biblatex.

@Emilie My library has a plugin for Google Scholar that makes it trivial to access papers through the library (you just login once when accessing off-campus, and then use the link for the plugin rather than the standard link when searching for papers). Maybe yours has something similar?

@BryanKrause That would be a life saver. I wrote to my librarian but I'll look it up

@BryanKrause Given that info, I was able to find that we can set up Google Scholar so that a link is added to the library entry when it's available. It's not as fast as what I used to have but it's only a little bit slower than my initial workflow. Many many thanks :)

Might be better off on some aspects, given many of my links were in arxiv but have been published since

@Emilie Great, glad that works for you! Scholar is usually good with showing the correct version (i.e., published version instead of preprint) but sometimes gets a bit confused... for example "Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4" with 18000 citations shows the arxiv rather than J Stat Soft version, but you can find the others via the "All XX versions" link.

@BryanKrause The good part is also that Google scholar works fairly well on mobile

vs. my library website urrrrrgh :)

For most of these articles, I'm just doing a broad overview so getting a previous version probably isn't too problematic but I'll keep that in mind

The whole "Database by subject search" aspect of my library seems sort of outdated. I was taught to use it but barely ever did. I'm guessing libraries all over use this sort of system

Google has that way of coming up with products that I love and then pulling the plug on them. I'm not sure what I'd do if they pulled the plug on Scholar :)

@Emilie Oof, reading articles on mobile is a step I'm not quite willing to take yet, haha. In general I do feel a bit like library databases have gotten left behind in science...I don't know if that's because I don't know how to use them or just, as you say, they are outdated. Even PubMed, which is a common resource for my field, comes up short, because there are too many relevant journals that are not indexed there

@BryanKrause Interesting, and they're indexed by Google Scholar?

@BryanKrause I prefer reading on desktop by far too. I use diigo a lot and highlighting on mobile is a hassle.

@Emilie Yeah, Scholar is a lot more broad, so it is usually my main source for articles. A lot of the journals that have quantitative/statistical methods, for example, don't show up in pubmed because they don't fall within the scope of medicine & biology. I do use pubmed to set up alerts on particular keywords, however (the same is possible with scholar but I haven't bothered to do so there yet).

But I started my MA and got two kids since, so what needs to be done needs to get done :)

Fair enough :)

I just feel like "the kids these days" use their mobile devices a lot more than I do... haha

@BryanKrause Oh I resisted getting a mobile for a long time. One good thing I've been trying it speech to text, just for getting hunches written down quickly

@Emilie Nice, that's the sort of thing I could probably find useful but am still too cautious to attempt

I find more use in scholar too, doing multidisciplinary stuff

If I used the database by subject, I would miss so much