KnowledgeNET Frequently Asked Questions

Hopkins KnowledgeNET™ (HKNET) is a collection of databases licensed specifically for Johns Hopkins alumni use, providing access to several thousand academic journals, e-books, and reference materials. It also includes links to hundreds of freely available scholarly and research-oriented online resources, digital libraries, and other Johns Hopkins publications.

No, it does not. 

Hopkins KnowledgeNET provides a collection of databases that we have licensed specifically for alumni. HKNET is completely separate from the Johns Hopkins libraries and all of their electronic resources and collections. Johns Hopkins library database licenses have restrictions that only allow current students, faculty, and staff to access them, so your remote access to these databases ends once you graduate. Please see the "Library Services Beyond HKNET" page for more details about using the libraries.

Unfortunately, the licenses that the JH libraries are bound by stipulate that access is restricted to current students, faculty and staff. This is the reason that the Alumni Association and Libraries partnered to create Hopkins KnowledgeNET. All of the databases in HKNET are licensed specifically for alumni to use, or the publishers have agreed to allow access to alumni via the libraries’ subscription. 

1. On the Hopkins KnowledgeNET Welcome Page, click on “Find a Journal” under "Licensed Databases" in the middle of the page.

2. At the ProQuest Publications screen, type the name of the journal in the search box (or use the alphabetical listing to browse by title).

3. Click Search

4. You’ll see a list of titles with brief information. Please note the information next to each title regarding dates of full text access and any publisher-imposed embargo period (denoted as ‘DELAY’).

5. Click on the journal title of interest, and at the next screen, select a year and an issue for browsing.

6. On the results list, click on the full-text link for a particular article to view it.

Please note: We have several other databases that are not included in the Find a Journal search, including Annual Reviews, Project Muse and Sage Journals Online. These are publisher-specific databases, and can be browsed separately. You'll find links to them under "Licensed Databases".

The databases currently available in Hopkins KnowledgeNET are:

• Alumni ABI/INFORM Collection (business/mgmt/finance/human resources/IT journals)
• Alumni Research Library (social sciences/sciences/arts/humanities journals)
• Alumni ProQuest Medical Database (biomedical journals)
• AM Explorer
• Annual Reviews (sciences and social sciences)
• ARTFL
• Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers
• British Literary Manuscripts
• British Online Archives
• Coronavirus Research Database
• Data Axle Reference Solutions (formerly Reference USA
• Gale in Context: Biography
• Gale Literature Resource Center
• Gale Primary Sources
• Grove Music Online
• Henry Stewart Talks--Business & Management Collection
• Mergent Archives
• Mergent BondViewer
• Mergent Intellect
• Mergent Online
• Project Muse (JHU and other university press journals)
• Sage Business Cases Online
• Sage Data
• Sage Journals Online (multidisciplinary)
• Sage Knowledge (eBooks)
• Sage Research Methods
• Sage Research Methods Cases
• U.S. Declassified Documents Online (Gale)

We have full-text articles from the New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine and New York Times Upfront. However, we only have abstracts to the other sections of the New York Times. You can find these publications in the Alumni Research Library database listed under Licensed Databases. We do not have the Wall Street Journal.

Click here to view a short video about this topic.

PubMed is a publicly-available database that provides citations and abstracts to millions of biomedical journal articles. It also includes full-text articles from Open Access (OA) and freely-available journals. PubMed itself does not provide full-text access to commercially published articles. As students, you were able to access medical articles because the library had subscriptions to the journals in PubMed and created the links to the articles, but that behind-the-scenes work was transparent to you. Access is not available after your JHED ID expires.

In HKNET, we have a database called ProQuest Medical Database that has full-text articles from over 2,000 medical journals routinely cited in Medline. You can run your searches in PubMed and then look up the citations in ProQuest Medical Database using the “Find a Journal” search. Or, you can simply run your subject/author searches in ProQuest Medical Database and view full-text articles from your results list. If you do want to use PubMed, we have a link to it in the Medicine Resources, under Free Databases, and also Libraries & Museums (PubMed is produced by the National Library of Medicine). NLM produces a companion database called PubMedCentral that has over 6 million freely available full-text articles. 

A program from JSTOR, called JPASS, offers access for alumni to those journals from the JSTOR archive that publishers have made available to alumni - more than 2,000 titles.  Monthly and annual fee options available. Click here for more information.

The easiest way to see what journals we have in a subject area is to use the “Find a Journal” search, and type in key term(s) for your subject:

1. On the KnowledgeNET homepage, click  “Find a Journal” in the middle of the page.

2. At the ProQuest Publications screen, type Real Estate. Then select the "in Subject" choice, or click on "Look Up Subjects" and select the most appropriate one for your topic.

3. Click Search

4. You’ll see a list of journal titles with brief information; please note the information next to each title regarding dates of full text access and any publisher-imposed embargo period (denoted as ‘DELAY’).

5. Click on the journal title of interest, and at the next screen, select a year and an issue for browsing.

6. From the results list, click on the full-text link for a particular article to view it.

Some journal publishers impose an embargo period of 3-12 months on the availability of full-text articles. So, while you can still see the citations and abstracts of the articles, the full-text will not be available until after the embargo period. Information about any embargo period is available in the Publications search in the ProQuest databases (Alumni Research Library, ABI/INFORM Collection and ProQuest Medical Database), or by using the 'Find a Journal' link on the HKNET homepage.

While most of the resources in Hopkins KnowledgeNET are in English, there are some foreign language journal articles in the ProQuest databases.

Hopkins KnowledgeNET does not have a dissertations database in its collection. However, since 2013, dissertations and many theses produced by JHU students are available in our repository JScholarship.

Please see the Sheridan Libraries FAQ for more complete information about accessing JHU dissertations and theses.

Another option is to purchase a copy of a dissertation from ProQuest. You can order it online by going to ProQuest Dissertations Express at:
http://www.proquest.com/products-services/dissertations/Dissertation-Express.html

Under “Licensed Databases”, Sage Data is a good starting point for any kind of data. Data Axle Reference Solutions (formerly ReferenceUSA) is another good resource for business market research. A number of additional resources can be found under each subject heading, often under the categories labeled “Free Databases”, “Research Resources”, and “Statistics and Data”. Many government organizations’ websites also contain reliable data.

Follow the link from the Hopkins Publications and Resources source types page to JScholarship.

REFWORKS is a citation management tool that many students use to manage their citations, create bibliographies and share citations. Your access to it as a student ends when your JHED ID expires. However, you can still have a REFWORKS account as an alumnus. See this guide for help.

Please note: Legacy RefWorks ended in Jan. 2023; please see this guide for information on what to do.

No, it does not. 

Hopkins KnowledgeNET provides a collection of databases that we have licensed specifically for alumni to use. HKNET is completely separate from the Johns Hopkins libraries and all of their electronic resources and collections. Johns Hopkins library database licenses have restrictions that only allow current students, faculty, and staff to access them, so your remote access to these databases ends once you graduate. Please see the "Library Services Beyond HKNET" for more details about using the libraries.

Hopkins KnowledgeNET is provided for your intellectual enrichment and lifelong-learning goals, and your use will need to be restricted to these purposes. For more information, please see the Hopkins KnowledgeNET Acceptable Use Policy.

Hopkins KnowledgeNET is provided for your intellectual enrichment and lifelong-learning goals, and cannot be used for commercial purposes or as a substitute for a corporate information service. You may search Hopkins KnowledgeNET from your office/workplace, but you will not be able to use it for commercial or for-profit purposes. For more information, please see the Hopkins KnowledgeNET Acceptable Use Policy.

Please see the United States Copyright Office’s site: http://www.copyright.gov

Our FAQs are the first place to go for answers to your questions. HKNET staff are available to answer other informational, content and navigational questions via email alumni.library@jhu.edu 

There is not a search function that includes all of the various databases and resources within Hopkins KnowledgeNET. The “Find a Journal” link is the first place to start if you’re looking for a particular journal title. It searches the ProQuest databases: ABI/INFORM Collection, Alumni Research Library and ProQuest Medical Database. Click here to watch a short video about this feature. All of the other databases must be searched or browsed separately.

Our ProQuest databases can all be searched at the same time with the Find A Journal link, but our other databases, e.g. Mergent, Sage, Gale, etc. have their own proprietary search programs and must be searched individually. Because our databases come from many different publishers, it would require implementing a product called a “discovery tool” to conduct a search across all of them. A discovery tool is quite costly in terms of funding and IT support and maintenance, and is beyond the reach of the HKNET team at this time. 

You are most likely clicking on the “Browse a list of titles available in [database name]” from the database description on the Hopkins KnowledgeNET page. This link goes to a web page that has a list of journal titles, but no direct links to the journals themselves. To enter the database itself, you need to click on the database title, e.g. Alumni Research Library. This should open the database in a new browser window. Once you're on the database page, click on the Publications tab at the top to see a list of all the journals available in that database.

There are two ways to find an article from a citation: Search on the journal title, or do an author/keyword search:

By journal title [Click here to watch a short video about this feature]:
1. On the home page, click on the link, “Find a Journal”.
2. At the ProQuest publications screen, type the name of the journal in the search box (or browse alphabetically).
3. Click Search
4. You’ll see a list of titles with brief information. Please note the information next to each title regarding dates of full text access and any publisher-imposed embargo period (denoted as ‘delay’). If the journal is listed but doesn’t have any date information, then only abstracts and citations are available.
5. Click on the journal title of interest, and at the next screen, select a year and an issue for browsing.
6. On the results list, click on the full-text link for a particular article to view it.

By author/keyword:
1. On the homepage, select Licensed Databases.
2. Select a relevant database from the following: ABI/INFORM Collection, Alumni Research Library, ProQuest Medical Database.
3. At the Advanced Search screen, you'll see three empty search boxes.
4. In the first search box, type the author’s last name e.g. hanson.
5. In the second search box, type keywords from the article title, e.g. diabetes.
6. Click Search
7. From the results list, click on the full-text link for a particular article to view it.

Please note, the above instructions work only in the ProQuest databases. We have several other databases that are not covered by the above search, namely Annual Reviews, Project Muse and Sage Journals Online. These are publisher-specific pages, and can be browsed separately. You'll find links to them in the "Licensed Databases" section.

There are ebooks within some of the Licensed Databases, including Gale Primary Sources and Sage Knowledge. We also have an entire category of Electronic Books on the HKNET homepage under Source Types. 

We have a variety of types of databases, some multidisciplinary, such as Alumni Research Library, and others more content- or subject-specific, such as ProQuest Medical Database. The best way to select a database for your specific needs is to read the brief descriptions for each database on the Licensed Databases page or go to the Subject Resources page for your subject and use the Licensed Databases list. 

Many lists of references/citations use abbreviated journal titles. Unfortunately, the Find a Journal search does not recognize abbreviations. If your journals are biomedical, you can use the PubMED Journals database at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=journals Simply type in the abbreviation, and it will return the full title of the journal, which you can then search in our “Find a Journal” search. Unfortunately, we don't know of a similar tool for humanities or social sciences.

The easiest way to see what journals we have in a subject area is to use the “Find a Journal” search, and type in key term(s) for your subject:

1. On the homepage, scroll down and click on ‘Licensed Databases’.
2. Click on the first link, “Find a Journal”.
3. At the ProQuest Publications screen, type: Real estate or realtor or realty or property.
4. Click Search
5. You’ll see a list of titles with brief information; please note the information next to each title regarding dates of full text access and any publisher-imposed embargo period (denoted as ‘DELAY’). If only abstracts and citations are available, the journal will be listed but won’t have any date information.
6. Click on the journal title of interest, and at the next screen, select a year and an issue for browsing.
7. From the results list, click on the full-text link for a particular article to view it.
8. Click here to watch a short video about this feature.

The Alert Service is a great feature of ProQuest, but because Hopkins KnowledgeNET access is via a proxy server, it cannot complete a link from an email message to the ProQuest article. To see the article(s), you must login to Hopkins KnowledgeNET, click on the relevant ProQuest database, and enter your search using the search boxes on Advanced Search page, or the Browse button to find it by Publication name (journal title).

If you are in one of the ProQuest databases, there is an option to ‘mark’ citations and articles for downloading, emailing, etc. However, the marked list only lasts for that search session. To do a permanent save, you must display the full-text of each article and then use the “save as” function from your browser’s File menu. From the Marked list, it is not possible to save the full-text of any of the articles. You can only save the marked list of citations as a bibliography. You can also create a "My Research" account. My Research is a place where you can save, manage, and organize the content and supporting materials you find and create in ProQuest. You can include documents, searches, search alerts, RSS feeds, and more in My Research. Click on the Help ? icon on any ProQuest page, and select My Research from the menu to learn more. 

The world of ebooks consists of open access (OA) ebooks (those that are freely available to anyone), ebooks that are only available to registered members of an institution, and many other variations on access. So the answer to this question varies depending on which site you’re using. Some sites, like AM Explorer, are set to search only those ebooks that the JHU libraries subscribe to (note the ‘Search products held at my institution’ limiter.)  Other sites, e.g. Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) or Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) offer free access to all of their ebooks. Others recommend that you set up an account and then login each time. If you encounter any problems, please feel free to email us at alumni.library@jhu.edu

You are most likely clicking on the “Browse a list of titles available in [database name]” from the database description on the Hopkins KnowledgeNET page. This link goes to a web page that has a list of journal titles, but no direct links to the journals themselves. To enter the database itself, you need to click on the database title, e.g. Alumni Research Library. This should open the database in a new browser window. Once you're on the database page, click on the Publications tab at the top to see a list of all the journals available in that database.

There are several reasons why this may happen:

a. Hopkins KnowledgeNET uses a proxy server to provide access to authenticated users (Johns Hopkins alumni only). If you are searching from a work computer, it may be that the firewall or security settings at your work are interfering with your access. You may want to try from a different computer, i.e. home computer, and/or contact your IT support at work.

b. The database itself may be experiencing technical difficulties at the time, and you may want to try back later.

We do not provide a document delivery service through Hopkins KnowledgeNET, but you have several other options depending on how quickly you need the article, and whether or not you're willing to pay for it.

a. If you're in the Baltimore area, alumni may request PRINT materials held off-site at the Libraries Service Center (LSC), our off-site shelving facility, by calling (410) 516-8370. Please identify yourself as an alumni and you will receive further instructions for checking-out JHU-owned PRINT materials.

b. You can make an interlibrary loan request through your public library, and they will get a copy of the article from another library on your behalf. This service is usually free, but can take some time, typically 2-4 weeks, but check with your library for more accurate turnaround times.

c. There are commercial document suppliers who will supply an electronic copy of an article for a fee, usually in a very short timeframe. Prices subject to change. One that we know of is through the Copyright Clearance Center:
http://www.copyright.com/business/document-delivery-with-rightfind/

d. Many journal publishers have pay-per-view options. You can usually find a link to it from the publisher web site.

Yes, there are several web sites that provide free access to some journal articles. Most are in the sciences. Here are several to try:

• BioMed Central: http//www.biomedcentral.com/
• Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.doaj.org
• PubMed Central: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov

It can be challenging to find access to resources in other countries, and each country will probably have different levels of access. In general, we recommend finding the nearest academic library, and inquiring about obtaining some type of access privileges.

Please refer to the Sheridan Libraries’ website for further information: https://www.library.jhu.edu/library-departments/special-collections/rare-books/

REFWORKS is a citation management tool that many students use to manage their citations, create bibliographies and share citations. Your access to it as a student ends when your JHED ID expires. However, you can still have a REFWORKS account as an alumnus. See this guide for help.

Please note: Legacy RefWorks ended in 2023; please see this guide for information on what to do.

Office of Alumni Relations staff is available for quick informational questions at alumni@jhu.edu or telephone, 410-516-1205 or 1-800-JHU-JHU1 Monday through Friday between 8:30am-5:00pm ET.

For questions about HKNET navigation or content, email the KnowledgeNET Librarian staff at alumni.library@jhu.edu. Be sure to provide a detailed description of your information need so that we can quickly steer you to the appropriate resources.