Steps involved in Finding a journal/magazine article

A magazine or journal is something that is published periodically, and so in libraries they are called periodicals. A magazine is a periodical that can be published daily, weekly, or monthly. Magazines usually contain fairly short articles written in a style of writing that is easy to understand. There are usually lots or advertising in a magazine. A journal, however, contains the results of research or experiments done. Usually in a journal article there is data presented about a research project, and the language can be quite technical, and there are few advertisements.

There are many magazines and journals published that are related to education. Some of these journals contains articles written for educators, but are not research content. Other journals and magazines contain helps for educators, ideas to help in teaching, or news items for educational associations. Doing educational research requires that you look at journals that contain results of research. Again there are many journals that contain results of research. How do you access the information in these journals? Well, some research education journals are located in the basement of this library, others are located in an online database, while others are located in neither location, but are located in other libraries.

>Unlike books, the contents of journals are not available in the SE library catalog. So where are they located? They are located in magazine and journal indexes. Magazine and journal indexes assign a subject to each article in each journal indexed in the magazine and journal index. Until the 1990's most magazine and journal indexes were in paper, now they are almost all on the Internet. Some of these journal indexes on the Internet index popular magazines, other scholarly, while others are devoted to one subject area, NO Journal Index indexes every journal that is published, so they are selective.

HOW TO FIND RESEARCH ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

Step One: Look in a Magazine/Journal Index or Database

A periodical index is a publication that indexes the content of periodicals. There are many different periodical indexes, some general and some subject specific. One thing needs to be made clear: There is not any periodical index that indexes every single periodical being published today. So each index is selective in what periodicals it indexes. Periodical indexes tend to index the most important or most popular or most respected or well known periodicals. Many periodical indexes that were originally published in paper are now online.

Step Two: Check to see if the article is available online Full-Text

(the steps from here on pertain only to online databases)

Databases have changed much in the last ten years. it used to be that databases contained only the citation (information needed to find the article) and sometimes a summary, or abstract of the article. Starting about ten years ago, database vendors began to offer some articles in full-text, that means that the entire article was available online, making it unnecessary to find the article in a library. Now there are fewer databases that offer no titles in full-text, and so after doing research in one of SE's databases, check to see if the article that you are interested is available full-text. There will be a link that say something like this: HTML full text, or PDF full text. When you click on the link, you are presented with the full-text of the article, and you are finished.

What if the full-text of the article is not available in the database that you are searching? If that is the case, then we move onto Step Three

Step Three: Check to see if the article is available online Full-Text in another database

If you can't find an article full-text in one database, then look to see what other databases have a journal title available full-text. You do that by checking another database called A-to-Z. A-to-Z is located at: http://atoz.ebsco.com/home.asp?id=seosu, or you can also get to A-to-Z from the electronic resources page at: http://www.se.edu/lib/electres.htm. A-to-Z is a list of journals that are available full-text, either in an online database that we subscribe to or available in the library in paper in the basement on in microform.

Step Four: Check to see if the the SE Library has the journal in paper

The library subscribes to almost one thousand journals, magazines, and newspapers. In many cases the journal article that you want is located in a journal that we have downstairs in the basement, or on microform. How do you check to see if the library has a journal? By checking A-to-Z, or checking a copy of the SE Library's Periodicals Holding List http://www.se.edu/lib/perhold.htm Below is a list of journals on or related to child development that the SE Library subscribes to.

Step Five: Use InterLibrary Loan to obtain the article from another college library that has the journal that you want

If you have determined that you cannot locate a journal article full-text on any online database, AND the SE library does not have the journal that the article is in, then what do you do? Give up? You can, but if the article is an important one for your research, you would still like to get it, right? There is one last way for you to get a copy of this article. You can obtain a copy of an article from almost any journal by using a service called Interlibrary Loan. Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a service that the SE Library provides to students where you can ask (through us) another library that has the journal title that you want . The process of doing this is simple.

1. Obtain an Interlibrary loan form from the circulation desk or go to an online InterLibrary Loan form at: http://www.se.edu/lib/illjournalreq.htm for a journal article and http://www.se.edu/lib/illbookreq.htm for Interlibrary loaning a book. 2. Fill out the form, take note that those fields of the form that have an asterisk in front of them are required fields that are needed to send the information via e-mail. Click submit after filling out the form. 3. The process of receiving something from InterLibrary loan takes about 4 days to two weeks, so if InterLibrary Loans are needed, you need to give yourself sufficient time before your paper is due to allow your Interlibrary Loan materials to come in.

Last Updated: June 23, 2008