American and Canadian Studies

Journals are also known as periodicals.  They are an important resource because they:

• are published on a regular basis
• contain the most up to date scholarly research in their subject
• tend to be shorter and discuss the subject in more detail than books

Some examples: Lancet; Nature; Journal of Black Studies; Art History; Journal of World Literature.

Don't rely solely on Google or even Google Scholar for your research!  Findit@Bham is a good place to start looking for good quality journal articles, but it is more efficient if you use one of the bibliographic databases available in your subject.  These will find relevant journal articles and sometimes also books, reports, working papers and conference proceedings.

Some databases will give direct full-text access to the articles.  Others will provide an index and abstract (a short summary) of the article. 

If the full text is not available in the database, there will be a link to check if we have the full text available from elsewhere. 

The 'Using FindIt@Bham to search for journal articles' video tutorial outlines how to search for journal articles effectively:

The easiest way of finding journal articles in FindIt@Bham is to enter your search terms into the simple search bar and select the Articles button below the search box. You can leave the dropdown options set to Everywhere and Everything. If you are using the Dubai version of FindIt@Bham, leave the dropdown options set to Dubai Campus and Everything (Dubai).

For example, to search for articles on the phenomenon of 'code switching' in the speech of bilingual children:

This will search through a large number of electronic full-text collections of academic journals which we subscribe to. It is a powerful search which extends over all subject areas, so you can be quite specific and detailed in your search terms. You should combine your search terms with Boolean operators (AND/OR) and make use of search techniques to make your search as precise as possible:

• AND e.g. Weber AND capitalism. This will search for all records which contain both these terms.
• OR e.g. speech OR communication. This will search for records containing either of these terms. An OR search will find more hits than an AND search. It is useful if your terms are synonyms or if they refer to similar concepts.
• PHRASE SEARCHING e.g. “group dynamics”. This will find only those records where these terms are found together, and will not find the words in any other contexts. In most databases, phrases can be indicated by double quotation marks around them.
• BRACKETS e.g. dyslexia AND (diagnosis OR assessment). Brackets can be used to combine any of the operators above. This will find records containing ‘dyslexia’ as well as either ‘diagnosis’ or ‘assessment’.
• TRUNCATION e.g. sociolog*. This will find any records which have words beginning with this root: sociology, sociological, sociologist, etc. Truncation is indicated by an asterisk (*).

[N.B. The operators AND and OR need to be typed in capitals]

Select the search button   , and a list of results will be generated, the most relevant being listed first:

Each result will also display a number of options to access the full text of the article:

• View Full Text will link you through to a list of the platforms where full-text is hosted. Selecting one of these platforms will link you through to where the full-text content is hosted.
• View Article PDF or Read Article will link you either directly to the full PDF or to the full-text of the article on the publisher's platform. This won't appear for every result, but where it does it will reduce the number of links that need to be followed before full-text is reached.
• Browse Issue Contents will link you through to the full issue of the journal in which the article has been published. This can be useful for checking to see if there are other articles published in the same issue that are applicable to the topic you are researching.

If your search produces too many results, use the Tweak my Results column appearing on the left to narrow down your results. This column contains filters such as:

• Date of publication; 
• Subject;
• The journal or collection it was published in.

Watch the 'Improve your FindIt@Bham results using filters' video to learn more about this functionality: