Recently, I helped a student who had grabbed the URLs from the address bar of their browser when they had found a few articles. They were wondering why the URLs would no longer take them to the articles. The student sent me the URLs hoping I could figure out how to get back to the articles they had found. Usually, when we get questions like this, it’s common to tell the student they’ll need to run their searches again because the URLs they have are useless. Actually, though, with some detective work and depending on the database, you can find your way back to specific articles from these URLs. Here’s how you do it.
I’ll use an article I found on my own for this blog post instead of the ones the student sent me. Just by reading the URL, I could see that the articles were from EBSCO databases. Here’s an example of a URL I grabbed the address window of my browser after I had run a search for articles about turtles and brought of the results up on my screen:
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=13&sid=542f6470-1149-447c-8c56-7a7f2654505b%40sessionmgr101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=94886700&db=bth
Scanning the URL, it’s easy to see that is from one of our EBSCOhost databases:
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=13&sid=542f6470-1149-447c-8c56-7a7f2654505b%40sessionmgr101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=94886700&db=bth
Next, you have to figure out which EBSCO database the student was in. All EBSCOhost databases have a unique three-letter code to distinguish them. If we look again at my sample URL, we can see a string of characters at the end that reads “db=bth.” The “db” is for “database” and “bth” is the unique three-letter code we were hoping to find. URLs commonly are structured like this with some sort of field code (like “db”) and an equals sign and then some unique identifier number or code (like “bth.”)
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=13&sid=542f6470-1149-447c-8c56-7a7f2654505b%40sessionmgr101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=94886700&db=bth
There is an EBSCO support page that lists all their databases with their three-letter codes. I went to that page and used CTRL-F to search the page for the “bth” code. From there, I learned that is the code for Business Source Complete.
Another thing that is commonly in these URLs for EBSCO databases is the accession number for the article. Every article in EBSCO is assigned a unique number as it is added to a database. Looking at the URL, we can see a string of characters near the end with “AN=94886700” with “AN” being the code for “accession number” and the eight-digit number after it being the accession number for a specific article.
http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=13&sid=542f6470-1149-447c-8c56-7a7f2654505b%40sessionmgr101&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#AN=94886700&db=bth
The last step is to go into the right EBSCO database, paste in the accession number in the search box, limit the field search option to “AN Accession Number,” and run the search. Using that approach with the two URLs the student shared with me, I was able to find the articles and get the student permalinks.
If you look at an article’s permalink, you can see that it too has the database code and the accession number as part of the URL:
http://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=94886700&site=ehost-live
I think this same strategy may also work with Gale and ProQuest database URLs. I’ll look into it and do additional posts here if that is indeed the case.