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Electronic Journals
ELECTRONIC JOURNAL TIPS
What are electronic journals?
The University of Utah Libraries have electronic access to over 18,000 periodicals.
Many of these are the online edition of long-established scholarly journals,
some are digitized collections of the text of newsstand magazines and newspapers,
and a few are new academic endeavors which exist only online. Most can be read
directly using your web browser (like Netscape or Internet Explorer.) For some
you may need to install a free helper application - typically Adobe
Acrobat to read PDF files.
Who can access them?
The library buys these subscriptions, just as we buy paper ones. The publishers
then program their computers to allow access from U of U Internet addresses.
You have a campus IP address if you are using a computer connected to the campus
network.
See instructions
if you're a U of U student or employee who wants to connect to library resources
using a private Internet service provider.
How do you access articles?
Since access is only for those who subscribe, the full content of electronic
journals can't be found by public search engines and directories like Yahoo
or Google.
If you already know which journal you need:
Go to the library's home page Under "Research Tools" choose either (or both, there is not complete overlap):sample e-journal record
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America is available as follows: [from 01/01/1990 to present in National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)] [from 1915 to 1999 in JSTOR]
- library catalog -- UNIS. Do a journal title search. Near the top of the record is a link to the journal.
sample UNIS record
Nature (London, England)
London, etc., Macmillan Journals ltd.
Vol. 1 (Nov. 4 1869)-
http://www.nature.com/nature/
Full text coverage starts: Vol. 387, no. 6633 (June 5, 1997)In some cases, our access is not based on a subscription with the original publisher. Some indexers, often those catering to undergraduates, businesses, or the general public, have bought the right to aggregate other publishers' content into their index. In these cases, the UNIS link will put you into the index , but you will have to search the journal's name (or the article's author or title) again.
sample UNIS record
Consumer reports
Mt. Vernon, N.Y.] Consumers Union.
Vol. 7, no. 6 (June 1942)-
http://search.epnet.com/login.asp
Select: Academic Search Elite: Full text coverage starts: July 1997
Clicking on the link takes you to a list of indexes, select Academic Search Elite, click, hit enter. You will see a search screen; put Consumer Reports in the "magazine" box.
Each indexer handles this a bit differently, but all allow you to do a search by periodical or "source" title. Read the help screen for exact advice and try the "guided" or "advanced" search option. This method is indirect, but is the only digital access for some titles, especially newsstand-type magazines. If the title is in our E-journal list, access may be more direct. Some of these indexers don't include every article – especially if they consider it minor or if there are special copyright restrictions.
If you want articles on a certain subject or by a certain author
Use indexes linked under article
databases on our homepage.
–Thorough method.
Use discipline specific indexes-- like Chemical Abstracts, ERIC, MLA Bibliography,
PsychInfo. Do your search; your resulting citations will tell you journal names,
look those up in UNIS. Some indexes are beginning to link directly to UNIS or
to the article itself.
–Quick and dirty method.
EbscoOnline offers keyword access to articles from thousands of recent journals
from many, but not all, scholarly publishers. Your search results will often
link directly to the article, if we subscribe to the journal.
How far back do these go?
Most publishers started to issue electronic editions in the late 1990s. Few
of them have digitized older issues. If UNIS links you to a long run of a title,
it is likely to be through JSTOR which offers
the searchable text and full page images of hundreds of journals in the humanities,
social sciences, business, education, and general science from 1665 on.
What's in the future?
- Easier linking. A few indexes already have direct links to the article, and
an increasing number link at least to the journal's homepage or to the UNIS
record, which has the URL or call number.
- Clickable footnotes. Major scholarly publishers are cooperating to make it possible for them to link directly to each others' articles. You are now able to read an article in, say, Science, click on a footnote citing a recent article in Nature and go directly to that article. See Crossref for a fuller explanation and sample articles (try the Science example).
- Current awareness. Most journals will email you a table of contents, with article links, as each issue comes out; read the journal's home page for instructions. To find the home page, use a search engine like www.google.com or look in our database and index list for Ulrich's, a very complete list of periodicals in all fields. Some subject indexes and Ingenta have an alerting service which notifies you as articles with keywords or names you designate are added; ask the Science Reference librarians 1-7533 for advice. You can get these alerting services even if we don't subscribe to the journal. Use your "copy" function to "paste" from the alert or table of contents into our online Interlibrary Loan form www.lib.utah.edu/ill/ to receive the article.
Need help?
Call 581-6273 with general questions
Call 581-7533 for science & engineering
or,
