Graduate students like me read lots of research papers. Not all research papers are available for free download online—yet—so we have to access them through our university’s EZProxy gateway. I made a simple bookmark that makes reading papers with EZProxy a snap and I am sharing it with you. For my university (UT-Austin), the address for the bookmark looks like this:

javascript:location.href='http://ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/login?url='+location.href

To generate an address for another university’s EZProxy gateway, simply replace the URL in single quotes with the appropriate URL for your university; if in doubt, check this helpful list.

Once you have the right address for your university, simply add it to your bookmarks. Now, whenever your literature search leads you to an academic paywall page (usually an IEEE or ACM page for me), just click on this bookmark and your browser will automatically redirect to the same page through the EZProxy gateway (possibly asking you to supply your university credentials). In one click, you get to read the PDF!

By the way, this kind of Javascript-enabled bookmark (called a bookmarklet) has been around for a long time, but of the students I know none make use of it; hence this post.

Final note: there’s also a Chrome extension that accomplishes the same task (in fact, its author maintains the list of URLs linked above), but I prefer not to clutter my browser with extensions if a simple bookmark will do.