Known Journal Articles
Research Skill Development includes learning to find journal articles as well as books for assignments and general reading.
In this section you will learn how to:
identify citations to journal articles
find full journal titles from their abbreviations
Journal article citation
One of the citations in the bibliography shown earlier referred to a journal article
You can identify a journal article citation by:
the presence of volume number, issue number, and pagination
the absence of the name of the publisher or the place of publication
There may be variations in the citation style:
the title of the article may be omitted (usually in the bibliographies of older journal articles or books)
the journal title may be abbreviated
the volume number may be in bold or underlined
the issue number may be omitted
To help you recognize these components of a journal article citation, you should to be familiar with the numbering and arrangement of journals.
Journals (also called periodicals, serials or magazines) are publications like Scientific American, Physiological reviews, or Brain which:
- are published frequently e.g. Scientific American is published monthly; Physiological reviews is published quarterly
- contain articles by different authors
- usually cover a particular subject area such as public health, or orthodontics or rheumatology
- usually have full text versions available online
Journal Title Abbreviations
Journal titles are often abbreviated in citations e.g. Sci Am rather than Scientific American. When searching for journal articles in the catalogue you sometimes need the full journal title not an abbreviation.
If necessary you can find full titles in
Alkire, L. Periodical title abbreviations: By Abbreviation (vol. 1),
This is kept at the Research Help Desk.
Caltech has a list of journal abbreviations
Open the Caltech link in a new window by right clicking on the link above and then clicking on Open in New Window (or new tab)
Click on the first letter of the first significant word in the title
Click on Edit on your browser and select Find, Find on this page, or something similar depending on your browser.
Type in the abbreviation and if you are in luck you'll get the full title.
Leave this new window (tab) for the Caltech journals open until after you have finished the next question in MyUni, then close the window.
When you cite a journal article in an assignment it's usually best to use the full title of the journal, not an abbreviation.
Summary
You should now know how to:
Go to the next section Journal Title Search.
Back to the previous section of the tutorial Catalogue Search Results
Back to the tutorial Table of Contents
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