Similar to a magazine, but on topics that are usually more scholarly, a journal contains a collection of articles written by different authors. Unlike a book, the publication of a journal is on-going, with no finish date in sight. Journals can be available in an e-format or print or both.
Examples: Performance Research / Journal of Biochemistry / Victorian Studies
Magazine articles are usually written by journalists for a mass-market audience. Journal articles will have been written by researchers and will often have undergone a quality checking, peer-review process.
Peer review refers to a process that certain journals use to quality check articles before accepting them for publication. The article will have been read and commented on by a panel of experts, who will have inspected the research findings for accuracy and originality. If you are reading a peer-reviewed journal, you can be sure the information is “quality assured”.
Part 2 of the video above shows you how to use Library Search to look for journal articles.
Transcript: Using Library Search to access journals
So welcome to this video on using Library search to access journals. We'll show you how to find Journal titles relevant to your topic or interests as well as how to search for articles within journals.
Firstly, let's look at searching for Journal titles. So on Library Search you can find out what journals we're subscribed to by clicking on Journal Search just above the main search box and at this point you can either put in a journal title, subject or an ISSN which is the unique number for a journal if you have access to that information.
Now do make sure you're signed in when you start searching for Journal content so that if you want to get into the online versions of the journal you can do so straight away. And before we have a look at using the search box at the top, it's worth saying that the easiest way to look for Journal titles is to browse by category over here on the left-hand side. So you might choose Music, Dance, Drama, and Film and then you can further narrow that down if you're specifically looking at journals for Drama for example. And then you can see all the different journals there and access them online via the link here and then if we want to have a look at different issues of the journal if we go to available online', it'll tell you the places where it's available. And then you can have a look at different issues in here and view individual Journal issues and articles. You have the full text there and if we do have any print copies available of the journal, it'll tell you what campus they're held at and what issues we have as well.
If you know of a particular Journal that you've been recommended or you've discovered somewhere that would be helpful for your research or you just like to read it regularly you can type in the journal title and you'll find if we have access. And again you click on the link and you find all the different providers who supply that journal and if we go into this one here that has full text availability, you'll see that this provider presents you with the full image of the journal so you can actually flick through like you would a paper journal in the library.
What we'd recommend that you do is have a look at the list of journals for your subject on your subject guide and those will be journals that have been recommended for your particular course and have a have a look through those.
Right so in the second part of this video we're going to look at how to find Journal articles. So let's do a search on that topic that you might be researching. So I've done a search on Victorian Gothic, and we'll get a set of results and now I need to limit those results just to provide me with Journal articles. So over here we'll select articles and if we want to we can just look at a peer-reviewed journals as well so if your tutor recommends that you look at peer-reviewed journals which are quality assessed journals that have been looked at by a panel of experts then you can limit yourself to that. And if you just want the online articles again you can say available online and you can see our active filters over here on the left at all times. So, then I can start scrolling down through some of my results and so if an article looks interesting I can either click on the available online or you can get the PDF directly. So let's have a look online. Then again, you'll get a list of places where it's available, so I'll click on one here and you can see now the journal article which you can either read online, download, print and access in various ways.
So that's a brief overview of how to use Library search to search for journals and if you have any more questions about that just either ask on Library chat or contact your Academic Liaison Librarian.
