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

This tutorial demonstrates how to find the full-text of journal articles using resources available through Mississippi State University Libraries. These resources include Indexes and Databases that the library subscribes to, the library's Online Catalog, and the library's E-Journals list. All three of the 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 indexes and databases by clicking on the Indexes and 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 second record will pull up this screen. Note that the article is available electronically, and you can access the full-text by clicking on the Article link.

If the article is not available electronically, you will see two additional 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.) For best results, click on Direct Link to Title first. If that does not locate the journal you are looking for, you may also want to use the Browse by Title option.

If the journal issue you need is not available in print either, you can use the third option, Order/Borrow Materal from Another Library, to request that we get it from another library for you.

Finding Journals in the Online Catalog

If you have a citation for an article and would like to locate the full-text of the article, the best place to go is the Online Catalog, which is a listing of all the books and journals available through 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 the holdings of those libraries will also appear in the record.

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

Here is the catalog record for 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. We can also see if the journal is available electronically by clicking on the Find It button.

If MSU Libraries provides electronic access to the journal you are searching for, the title will appear, along with the sources of the electronic access. Sources could be databases to which the library subscribes or a publisher's site. The range of available issues of the 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, and 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. To find out if a journal is available in print, you should search for the journal title in the online catalog. 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 E-journals link in the middle of the page. You will then be brought to a search screen. 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 2003. However, access to recent issues is available in the Project Muse database. The second result in the screen shot below, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, is available full-text back to 1998 in three databases, but the most recent year of articles is not available due to publisher restrictions.

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 Brad Brazzeal, Instructional Services Librarian, on September 9, 2008.