Finding Full-Text Articles: E-Journals, Databases, and Beyond

This tutorial demonstrates how to find the full-text of journal articles using the following resources:

• Databases the MSU Libraries subscribes to
• The Online Catalog
• The E-Journals listing

These resources can be accessed from the library's homepage, and the quickest way to get to these resources is by using the shortcuts shown below.

Finding Journal Articles in Databases

If you are looking for journal articles about a topic you are researching, the best way to find these is to access the databases by clicking on the Databases link on the library's homepage. For many topics, a good database to start with is Academic Search Premier, and the screen shot below shows typical results from that database. Note that, for some results, you can see right away that the full-text is available in either HTML or PDF format. However, you will also come across articles that have the Find It button.

Clicking on Find It for the 6th record will pull up this screen. Note that the article is available electronically, and you can access the full-text by clicking on the Find this title in Lexis-Nexis Academic link.

If the article is not available electronically, you will see two other options in the Find It screen. First, there will be a link to the online catalog. By searching the online catalog, you can determine if the library carries the journal you need in print. More information on the online catalog is in the next section of the tutorial.

If the journal issue you need is not available in print either, you can use the third option, Borrow/Order through Interlibrary Loan (ILLiad).

Finding Journals in the Online Catalog

If you have a citation for an article and would like to locate the full-text, the best place to go is the Online Catalog, which is a listing of all the books and journals available through the MSU Libraries. It is a good idea to search the online catalog rather than relying solely on the E-Journals list (covered in the next section) because the online catalog will tell if a journal is available in print, electronically, both, or not at all. MSU Libraries shares this catalog with other libraries in the area, including the Mississippi University for Women Library and East Mississippi Community College, and the holdings of those libraries will also appear in the record.

When searching for a journal, be sure to do an Exact Search , with the search type changed to Periodical Title, as shown in the following screen shot.

If the library has any issues for that journal in its collection, you will see the name of the journal in the results list. You should then click on that journal name.

There are two records for this particular journal because some issues are available in print and others are available electronically. Keep in mind though that the library has some journals only in print and others only electronically.

Here is the catalog record for the print holdings of the British Journal of Educational Psychology. Note that Mitchell Memorial Library has this journal in print from volume 1, published in 1931, to volume 74, published in 2004. The print subscription was cancelled in 2005.

To see what is available electronically, you can click on the Find It button below the title that has [electronic resource] after it. For this journal, it will pull up the following screen. Sources for full text could be databases to which the library subscribes or a publisher's site. The range of available issues of a journal can vary by source. In this example, the journal is available back to 2001 in Academic Search Premier, but the most recent 6 months of issues are not available due to publisher-imposed restrictions.

When you click on the Academic Search Premier link, you will be taken directly to that database. You can then choose the year, volume, and issue of the journal that contains the article you are interested in.

Finding Journals Using the E-Journals List

The E-Journals list provides a convenient way to see which journals are available electronically through the library. Remember, however, that some of the articles you need may only be available in the library's print collection, and the Online Catalog will tell you about both print and online availability. If you are off-campus and need an article from the print collection, you can request it using the Library Express option in the ILLiad program.

In this example, we are trying to find an article in the Journal of Higher Education. From the library's homepage, click on the Journals link in the middle of the page, enter the name of the journal in the search box, and click on Search.

For this journal, coverage in the JSTOR database goes all the way back to 1930 but ends in 2006. However, access to recent issues is available in the Project Muse database.

We hope that this tutorial has been helpful. If you have any questions about finding journal articles, please Ask-a-Librarian.

This page was originally created by Jill Grogg and was last updated by the Library Instructional Services department on November 29, 2010.