Ejournals
Hello! I’m going to show you how to search for journal articles on the Library website. Journal articles provide information on the latest academic research and are a key resource for your assignments and dissertation.
Discover@Bolton is the main tool for you to use, think of it as a Library Google search! You enter your search terms and you search most of the Library’s resources.
Imagine you were interest in marketing in the higher education sector, enter marketing“higher education”. I’ve entered higher education in speech marks because I want Discover@Bolton to keep these words together a phrase, I don’t want every result containing the word education or containing the word higher, I want “higher education” only. It doesn’t matter if you forget to use the speech marks on phrases, but if you use them you will get a smaller, more focused, relevant set of results.
So look at your assignment title, pick out the keywords, enter them as search terms in Discover@Bolton and click Discover. You will see a long list of results, over 100,000. The list is a mixture of different resource types, books, journal articles, and the others listed under Item Type. We are primarily interested in the top quality academic information, Journal Articles, click on that and the other results will be removed. We have focused our results down to journal articles only.
Looking at the top result, you can see the article title, the journal title and publication details. As you hover over the result you will see the article abstract (summary) appear in the right pane of the screen. You can use this to determine if the article is useful to your assignment. If you want to read the article, click Full text Online next to it and the article will open up, you can print, save or read it online.
There will be articles that instead of having a Full Text Online link, will have a link saying Online Citation. This means that the full-text of the article is not available via Library subscriptions. You can order the article via the Library’s Inter-library Loan service, I’ll show you how to do this at the end of the video. However, there is a substantial amount of full-text information available to you, to demonstrate, if I click on Full Text Online on the left menu, the citation only results will be removed. You can see that the number of results has only dropped by a small number, so you can see that there is a lot of full-text information available for you.
Returning to our list of results, you can see that we still have a large number. This may indicate that we need to add some more keywords to focus the results down to a more relevant collection. But before you do that look through the first few results as the most relevant ones will be at the top. If you identify any that look useful, click the folder icon next to the result, they will be saved in the folder at the top of the page. This is a temporary store that will be lost when you close the browser, but it does enable you to save useful results from your initial search while you run more searches with additional keywords. So, hopefully after two or three searches you will have gathered enough relevant information for your assignments.
In the corner of the screen there is a Refworks login (previously called Flow). If you already have a Refworks account that you usually access through the databases A-Z, it’s produced by the same company, but the two products are not compatible at the moment, so it still a good idea to set up a new account here. So to create an account click on No Account? Sign Up here. Use your university email and a password of your choice. I already have an account so I’ll sign in.
We return to the results page and I click on the folder icon to access my Refworks account. You can see the items that I just saved, plus previously saved resources. I can leave them in the middle or sort them into specific Collections (folders). Have a look through the functions available for you. You can create a bibliography using selected results, I’m going to show that in detail in a separate video. Refworks is a really good way of saving and organising your results.
So, that shows you how to search for journal articles in Discover@Bolton, pick out your keywords and use them in the search; refine to Journal Article using the tools on the left; click Full Text Online if necessary; access the relevant results.
I mentioned Inter-Library Loans, if you need to order an item, click on Borrowing, Inter-Library Loans, read the information/instructions and fill in the request form there.
The eJournals tab on the homepage is useful for accessing a specific journal rather searching for articles. Let choose Journal of Medical Marketing as an example. Make sure you search by journal title rather than by topic or keyword. You can see the journal I’ve searched for and its shows that we have full text access with a year’s embargo via ProQuest Central and from 2005 to present via Sage Premier. You would click on the link to get into that specific journal and do some searches within it. However, if you are searching Discover@Bolton, you already by default searching that journal.
If you have any further queries please get in touch, visit the Library Desk, phone 01204 903094, email or contact your Subject Librarian.