This page will help guide you in identifying journal articles, as well as how to do both a broad basic article search, as well as using Scholarly Journals to find specific articles from your reading lists or other bibliographies/reference lists.
- Once you have a handle on journal articles and know what you are looking for, you will start conducting more focused, in-depth article searching. Please see our Databases section on the right, for help in searching a focused, specific range of resources.
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.
So what is a journal article?
Journal articles are smaller pieces of academic work, which are published in scholarly journals, and are focused on specific topics and research areas. Whilst books will be more broad and cover a wider area, 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.
Journal Articles and scholarly research will have a slightly different look and layout than regular non-journal articles (e.g. newspaper or magazines).
See our quick video below on Recognising Journal Articles
When you have a reference to a journal article and you know the title of the journal you are looking for, as well as the author, article title, volume, issue and date details, use our Journal Finder to go straight to the Journal you need. Journal Finder is part of our main Library Search.
Check for access to the journal in the first instance, then the year you need, and finally the volume and issue numbers. When you've got this far, you'll scroll down the table of contents to find the article you're looking for, then click on PDF for full text.
Check out our LETSbegin module on Locating books and articles from your reading lists.
See our short video on Finding Journal Articles in Library Search also.
Use Library Search to do a quick broad search for Journal Articles, using the "Content Type -> Articles" filter