How to access journals via the Library Catalogue and e-journals portal
As well as books you will need to journal articles for your assignments. When as academic or researcher carries out a piece of research, the results are written up and published as an article in an appropriate academic journal.
You can access journals via the library catalogue or the e-journals Quick Links tab on the library homepage. We will have a look at the Library Catalogue first. If you have been asked to read a particular article from a particular journal, you need to navigate to that journal via the catalogue. It’s important that you search for the Journal title not the article title. So for example, you have been asked to read an article from the journal ‘Practice Nursing’ . Type the Practice Nursing in the search box and click ‘Search’. From the list of results of want to find the journal title so I click the Journal option on the left of the screen under Loan Type, to leave me with a smaller set of results. You can see two entries for Practice Nursing – one says Main Library, that the print journal that you can find in the Library; the other says ‘Online’ that’s the electronic journal.
Click on the title of the print. You then see some information about the journal, such as the publisher and the period for which we have a subscription, 2000-2011 in this case. So you can come along to the library and use these journals, they are reference only, but you can photocopy them.
Click on the title of the e-journal. You will see that we have full-text access from 2007 to present. To access it click on Cinahl, which is the database containing the journal. At this point (especially off-campus) you may be asked to login to the University’s electronic resources login, enter your usual university username and password and login. Once you click on a blue link you leave the Library website and enter a publisher’s website, eg, Ebsco in this case. Publisher’s website will vary in appearance, but the principles of navigating them are the same.
You can see more information about the journal. On the right of the page you can see the volumes by year, if your article was from 2010 you would click on 2010. Journals are organised by volume and issue, the volume equate to a particular year, in this case 2010 and the number of issues depends on how frequently an issue is published, in this case monthly so there are 12 issues. So for example if your article was in volume 21, issue 10, you click on that link to access the articles contained in that volume and you would scroll through to find the one you need and click on the PDF link to access it. You can print it, save it or read it on-screen.
To access e-journals via the E-journal Quick Links tab, click on it to access the e-journals portal. Search for the same journal. Again you must search by journal title not article title. Access the journal by clicking on the link as before.
There are usually less results to scroll though on the e-journals portal which you may prefer. However, the advantage of using the catalogue is that your results include information about print journals as well as electronic journals.
Only use the catalogue and e-journals portal if you have been asked to access a specific article. If you need to search for journal articles on a topic use the academic databases
For further information about using journals and academic databases please see our range of cribsheets and screencasts or contact the duty librarian on the Library Subject Help Desk in the library, telephone 01204 903404, email