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Known Journal Article Search

Research Skill Development includes learning to find journal articles as well as books for assignments and general reading. Sometimes you'll get references to articles from reading lists, at other times from bibliographies in books and other journals. In this section you'll learn to locate journal articles that you know about already. Later you'll have to learn to find journal articles on particular subjects using databases.

In this section you will learn how to:

  •           identify citations to journal articles
  •           find full journal titles from their abbreviations
  •           find journal titles in the Library catalogue
  •           find which volumes and issues of a journal are held by the Library
  • 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 word 'in', name of publisher or 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
      • sometimes have full text versions available online

      As an example, below is part of a table of contents of the print format of the journal
      Journal of Nutrition
      for August 2006


    The Journal of Nutrition
    Official Publication of The American Society for Nutrition

    August 2006 . Volume 136 . Number 8

    Contents

    __________________________________

    Articles
    __________________________________

    RECENT ADVANCES IN NUTRITIONAL SCIENCES

    Interplay of Stress and Physical Inactivity on Muscle Loss: Nutritional Countermeasures
    Douglas Paddon-Jones
    2123

    Recent Advances on Structure, Metabolism, and Function of Human Milk Oligosaccharides
    Lars Bode
    2127

    HISTORY OF NUTRITION

    The Discovery of a Vitamin Role for Carnitine: The First 50 Years
    George Wolf

    2131

    BIOCHEMICAL, MOLECULAR AND GENETIC MECHANISMS

    Reduction of Cholesterol Absorption by Dietary Plant Sterols and Stanols in Mice
    is Independent of the Abcg5/8 Transporter
    2135

    Each month's (quarter's, etc.) publication of a particular journal is an issue
    e.g. the August 2006 issue. 
    A year of issues is a volume, e.g. volume 136 is the 2006 volume. 
    Most journals number their volumes and issues.

    The journal Journal of nutrition has published issues since 1928.  The August 2006 issue of this journal is: volume 136 = 2006, issue 8 = August.
    This may be written as 136(8) in citations.


    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 behind the Information desk.

    However you should try The PubMed Journals Database

  • Click on the button below.
    • Enter an abbreviated title.
    • Click on Go, and get the full title.

  • Leave this new window for the ubMed Journals Database open until after you have finished the question on journal abbreviation, then
  • Click on File in the top left of the screen, and then on Close to close the window.
  • When you cite a journal article in an assignment always use the full title of the journal, not an abbreviation.
    Summary
    You should now know how to:
    • identify a citation to a journal article
    • identify the journal title, volume, issue and pages in a citation
    • find the full title for a journal given as an abbreviation 
    • Logon to MyUni to answer Questions 4 and 5 of the Health Sciences Library Tutorial.

    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