Effective Writing Center (EWC)

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Online Guide to Writing and Research

Chapter 6 Table of Contents

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Chapter 6: Using Library Resources

Electronic Information Resources, the Internet, and the World Wide Web

How to Search for Journal Articles

Journal indexes or databases are tools that help you find articles. Printed indexes usually enable you to search for articles by author or subject. Electronic journal databases give you more flexibility in search options, enabling searches by author, subject, or keywords that can appear anywhere in the article, including the author name, article title, or journal title. These databases also allow such searches in the abstract or in the full text of the article, if the database includes the full text. In all cases, a journal index or database will include a citation for an article, and, in many cases, an abstract of the article will also be available. In online journal databases, it is frequently the case that the full text of articles is also included. Below are descriptions of what is included in a citation, an abstract, and the full text for a journal index or database.

Citations

All journal databases provide the article citation, which includes the title of the article, the author, the title of the journal in which the article was published, the volume number, the issue number, and the page numbers. You will need the full article citation to cite the article correctly in your research paper or project.
Abstracts

Some journal databases will provide both the article citation and an abstract, or summary, of what the article is about. Article abstracts should not be used as sources of information in a research paper, nor should they be quoted in any way. Because the abstract is often written by someone other than the author of the article, there is no guarantee that the information in the abstract accurately reflects information from the article.
Full Text

Some journal databases provide the full text of the article in addition to the citation. Full-text databases usually do not provide the full text of every single article in the database; some entries may have only the article citation and perhaps an abstract.

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