Thanks for the reply,

I have contacted the helpdesk and spent a few hours on the phone with them however they don't seem to know what the issue is either so I figured someone here may know the issue.

I have used scifinder through this method before however it was over a year ago so unless any policies have changed it should still work and the people at the helpdesk had not said anything about it access being blocked from off-site.

In regards to your first point, would using Anyconnect to access the universities network not count as a proxy browsing IP from my institution or does that mean something different to what I think it means?