Help on finding journal articles

General information about journals

To find more detailed or up-to-date information than is available in books, you will need to use journals (also known as periodicals). Journals are published regularly (eg monthly, bimonthly, quarterly), and each issue contains a number of articles (sometimes referred to as papers).

Some journal articles are on very specialised topics and report the results of original research. Other articles are on more general topics and summarise what is known about the topic.

Journals are published in both printed and electronic format. All the journals available within UWE, whether printed or electronic, are listed in the library catalogue - search using Periodical Title. The library catalogue lists the titles of journals available, not the articles in them.

Finding articles in journals

The easiest way to find articles in journals is to use one of the electronic resources covering your subject area.

Electronic resources can be broadly divided into two categories:

  • Full-text electronic journal collections, containing journals either from a single publisher, or in a particular subject area. Use an electronic journal collection when:
    • You are only looking for a few articles on your topic.
    • You plan to carry out a more thorough literature search, but just want a few articles to get you started.
  • Databases, which comprehensively index the contents of journals in the relevant subject area. They generally do not provide full text, but give a reference and usually include an abstract (summary). Databases cover many more journals than the library subscribes to. Some databases provide direct links to selected full-text articles. In other cases, you need to search the library catalogue to check whether the journal is available. If the journal is not available at UWE, you can obtain a copy of the article on inter-library loan. Use a database when:
    • You are looking for information on a specific topic and have been unable to find any information elsewhere.
    • You want to carry out a thorough literature search.

Some electronic resources combine the features of electronic journal collections and databases, and contain both full-text articles and abstracts only.

You will find details of electronic journals collections and databases on the Databases page. To do this, return to your subject resources page and click the 'Databases' button.

Further information

The iSkillZone provides further help in finding journal articles.

An animated Quick Guide to Database Searching is available which also provides a link to a print version of the guide.
A print version of Quick Guide to Database Searching is available in pdf format (PDF).