Research Skills Tutorial

Module 6: Finding Articles

Search the appropriate journal index or database
Obtain a complete citation
Locate the full text of the article
Finding the journal in the library

Search the appropriate journal index or database

Journal indexes or databases are tools which help you find articles. Journal indexes in print format usually allow you to search for articles by author or subject. With electronic journal databases, you can usually search by author, by subject, and by using keywords that can appear anywhere in the article, including the author name, the article title, the journal title, the abstract, or the full text of the article (if the database includes the full text). As you can see, electronic databases give you more flexibility in your search options.

UMUC's Online Access to Articles

Approximately 100 subscription databases, almost half containing full text articles, are available to current UMUC students, faculty, and staff over the Internet. The databases in include periodical indexes, reference materials, journal articles and electronic books. You can use the databases to find statistics, transcripts of television and radio programs, major U.S. and international newspapers, and scholarly and popular articles on a wide variety of topics.

To access the library databases, see Research Databases.

General and Specialized Indexes

Some journal databases contain journal article information that covers a range of topics. We call them general or multidisciplinary because they cover more then one discipline, such as business, medicine, engineering, etc. These types of databases are a good starting place for most research. See the Information and Library Services list of general multidisciplinary research resources.

Specialized databases usually only cover journals from one discipline or topic. These specialized databases usually cover that topic in more depth than do the general databases. See the Information and Library Services Search by Subject page for a list of databases by subject.

Full Text Databases

All journal databases provide the article citation, meaning that they give you information about the article such as the title of the article, the author, the title of the journal in which the article was published, the volume number, issue number, and pages.

Some journal databases will give you an abstract, a summary of what the article is about. The abstract helps you decide whether or not the article is relevant for your needs. Article abstracts should not be used as sources of information in a research paper, or quoted in any way. Since the abstract is often written by someone other than the article's author, there is no guarantee that the information in the abstract accurately reflects information from the article. If you wish to use information from an article, it is important to get the full text of the article.

Full text databases provide the actual text of the article in addition to the citation. In most databases you can email the full text articles to yourself, or you can print them out. See the Information and Library Services Research Databases page for lists of databases by subject or title, and look for the icons which indicate that a database has mostly full text or some full text .

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Obtain a complete citation

To find the article in the library, you must have the complete citation from the journal index. A complete citation includes:

article title
author
journal title
volume and issue numbers
date of publication
page numbers

You will also need the complete citation in order to list the article in your bibliography.

Example of a complete citation:

Distance Education and the Myth of the New Pedagogy [article title] by Mike Markel [author]. Journal of business and technical communication [journal title], 13, no. 2 [volume and issue], April 01, 1999 [date], 208 [page].

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Locate the full text of the article

If you can't get the full text of the article online, you may be able to go to a local public or academic library to obtain the article. To obtain an article from a library, you will need to identify the title of the journal or newspaper in which the article was published. Then, check the library's catalog to see if they own that journal or newspaper. For example, to see if a University System of Maryland library owns a particular journal, you would search on the title of the journal (NOT the title of the article) in the library catalog. (More information on this procedure can be found in Module #5.) If the journal is not owned by the library you are using, or not available in a full text database, you may obtain the article using DocumentExpress. Links to DocumentExpress are also available from within the library databases (look for the find it buttons) as well as on the Information and Library Services Web page.

Information and Library Services staff will send articles to you electronically in PDF format via the Web.

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Finding the journal in the library

In most academic libraries, current issues of journals are shelved alphabetically by title in a designated area of the library. Older issues of the journals are often bound and shelved in the stacks along with the books by call number. Some periodicals, especially newspapers, are found in microform (microfiche or microfilm). Most libraries do not circulate journals, so you will need to read the article in the library or make a photocopy.

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