Spend a very worthwhile 30 minutes or so on our highly recommended e-tutorial LETSbegin. This tutorial will:
'Periodical' is an umbrella term for newspapers, magazines, journals - any title published regularly or irregularly. The Library subscribes to thousands of scholarly journals both in print and (mostly) online. You will come across journal articles many times in the course of your studies; they may appear on your reading list and your lecturers will encourage you to consult journal articles when you're doing research, particularly when preparing your literature review.
Journal articles are excellent sources of scholarly information because they can provide very in-depth, up-to-date coverage of a subject; they are typically very structured and written by experts in a given field. Crucially, like books, journal articles that appear in scholarly academic journals are "peer-reviewed" which means they have been critically reviewed and evaluated by a panel of experts before being okay-ed for publication. All of this means that you (as researchers) are assured of the excellent quality of information in a published journal article.
If you have a reference to a journal article but you think elements of it may be incorrect (for example incorrect date, incorrect volume | issue number etc.) Google Scholar can be a useful tool for checking what's gone wrong. Enclose the title of the article you're looking for in quotation marks and search. Don't forget to change your settings in Google Scholar so that you get a quick link to our subscriptions on the right side of the page when an article is available.
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When you have a reference to a journal article, search for the title and author of the article in Library Search. You can use the filters on the left of the screen to narrow the results to show 'articles' only. If you also have the volume number, issue number and publication date of the article you can also search for the article in Journal Finder. Here, just enter in the title of the main journal, then use the details you have to narrow your result by year, then volume and issue number. From this point just click into the relevant issue and follow the page numbers down to find the article you're looking for. To access the article, click on PDF for full text.
What does a reference to a journal article look like?
Here's how to find a journal article on Library Search: