For the love of LibKey

Spending hours picking through literature search results? I’ve been there! Here’s a time-saving tool I wish I knew about in my first year of uni.

I’m in my 4^th year at ACU, but I remember being completely overwhelmed by literature searches as a first-year student. Scientific rigour was, let’s say, a work in progress. Back then, sourcing papers was still something I was getting my head around. My approach involved looking up phrases on google scholar and attempting to gauge whether the paper was relevant from the abstract. Then I would head to the ACU Library search, pop the paper in and find the full text article. This was laborious and led to me having very few references for some of my assignments.

It was only in second year, while studying with a friend, that I discovered LibKey. This tool quickly became so integral to my workflow that I actually cannot imagine doing any research without it.

What is LibKey Nomad?

LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that links to the university library’s existing subscriptions and identifies if a paper you’re looking at is accessible via institutional access. It does this all without hassle or fuss via a cute little blue box with a fire emoji that sits in the bottom left of your screen.

What does it do?

Essentially, this cute little box easily cuts the time and labour it takes to gather references in half. Not to mention, it makes this incredibly tedious task so much less procrastinate-able.

It grows with you as well. Through my degree as I moved from Google Scholar to databases to scouring journals, LibKey was a reliable presence. It makes my work so frictionless I tend to almost forget it exists.

Try this underrated tool for yourself

Despite its usefulness, LibKey is not a well-known tool. Many students simply do not know it exists. I discovered this when I reached out to other students in my cohort to ask them about how they use the tool. Instead of getting helpful anecdotes for this article, I ended up giving a post class tutorial to my friends in installing and using LibKey Nomad. These are people who have spent 4 whole years at ACU!

So, save yourself years of tedious full-text hunting and get the extension as early as you can. It’s super straightforward to get started, and the library has a handy set up guide that you can follow.