Philosophy

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. 

To find printed books, ebooks, print journals, online articles, DVDs and videos in your subject, go to FindIt@Bham and use either the Simple or the Advanced Search. Search by:

• author;
• title;
• keyword;
• classmark.

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

There are two ways of finding books on FindIt@Bham:

• If you know the author and title (or at least parts of the title), you can type these into the simple search box – e.g. human resource management beardwell.
• If you are looking for books on a particular subject, you can type in keywords which describe it – e.g. mathematics teaching.

In both cases, if you are only interested in books, we recommend selecting Library Catalogue from the second drop-down menu next to the search box and select the Search button :

This search finds both printed and electronic books. You can use the buttons below the search box to refine the results further. If you are interested in only print books, select the Print Books button. If you are interested in only electronic books, select the eBooks button. For example, to look up whether Human Resource Management (edited by Julie Beardwell and Amanda Thompson) is available in print, you would select the Print Books button: