Journals and e-journals

Information about using journals and e-journals for your research.

Access journals

Find journals using library search

Use library search to find journal articles. We've pre-filtered these two searches for you to use:

What are journals?

You will need to use journals for your research, mainly in electronic (e-journal) format. There are several different types of journals.

Academic journals (also known as peer-reviewed or scholarly)

Academic journals are quite specialised with long articles reporting on research projects with reference to earlier research in the field. The articles are peer-reviewed (that is, assessed by experts in the field) and tend to be reliable and acceptable sources of information to use in your academic work. Academic journals may be in print format or electronic format. Electronic journals are sometimes referred to as e-journals.

Find out more about what 'peer-reviewed' means (YouTube).

Professional journals

They are similar to academic journals but are more practice-oriented with updates for practitioners in that field and may be peer-reviewed. They may be published by a professional body (sometimes referred to as a professional organisation). They can include job advertisements.

Trade journals

They contain a wide range of information specific to the trade sector covered, including product and price information, job advertisements, and possibly directory information. They are not peer-reviewed, scholarly sources of information.