Library Guide for Education

The Library subscribes to thousands of scholarly journals both in print and (mostly) online. These journals are classed as 'periodicals,' i.e. any title published regularly or irregularly. The journal articles that appear in these journals 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 have been written by experts in a given field. 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 approved for publication.

Journal articles may appear on your reading lists and your lecturers will encourage you to consult journal articles when you're doing research, particularly when preparing your literature review. They contain certain elements that will help you to identify them easily - learn more in our video below.

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 - see a demonstration in the short video below.

If you don't easily find the journal article you're looking for in Library Search, you can also search for it in Journal Finder using the article's volume number, issue number and publication date. To do this, 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.

Useful Tips for finding specific Journal Articles

• Sometimes links to articles using Library Search can be incomplete or glitchy. If you find an article and the Full Text link does not work, or the page it brings you to says we don't have access, don't worry just yet. Take a note of the article information - title, author, and importantly the Journal publication, year, volume and issue number. You can then use this information to go back through the Journal Finder and go straight to the journal you need.
  As DCU Library subscribes to a wide range of journals and databases, sometimes information can be found through more than just one resource, so even if one resource says it's not available, it may be available through some other of our subscriptions.

• Using Google Scholar can be a useful aide in your research and for making sure information in hard-to-find journal articles is correct. If you have having trouble finding a particular article and think something may be wrong, e.g. incorrect issue/volume, year, or author, put in the full title of the article enclosed in quotation marks "" and hit search.
  Make sure to link your Google Scholar to DCU Library : Go to Settings > Library Links > select Dublin City University - Find It@DCU.
  Using this link will show you when we have subscriptions and full text links to articles so you can access them straight away.

Use the library's databases to do a more focused search for journal articles that relate to your topic. Click here for more information.