This tutorial to electronic journals or ejournals as they are better known is intended as an introduction to using them via the QMU Library Services

Transcription

1 This tutorial to electronic journals or ejournals as they are better known is intended as an introduction to using them via the QMU Library Services web pages. 1

2 An ejournal is any journal, magazine or other type of serial publication that is available over the Internet. Most ejournals are an electronic version of a title that is already available as a print version. ejournals have a table of contents page similar to a printed journal with hyperlinks to the full-text of the articles. Abstracts or summaries of articles are typically available with a link to the full-text of the article if you think it looks useful to you. The full-text of an article can generally be viewed as either a PDF document or in HTML format. 2

3 One advantage that ejournals have over traditional print journals is that information can be published more quickly and is made available online before the print version. Journals published online can include illustrations in a way that print editions never could by using multimedia such as short video clips, moving images and sound that can be accessed from within the journal article itself. Depending on the subject area, the electronic version can also include additional data. You will be able to carry out searches quickly and easily across the volumes and issues of an ejournal title. This is particularly useful if you are looking to find an article published by a particular author, or on a certain subject in a specific journal. Some ejournals also offer current awareness options such as search alerts and Table of Contents (TOC) alerts via or RSS feeds. These can keep you up-to-date with recently published articles on a particular subject or the availability of the latest issue. If you know you will need information on a specific topic, you can be alerted when new articles on that topic are published. ejournals are accessible 24 hours a day and this enables study and research to continue offcampus or when the LRC is closed. 3

4 Electronic journals are made available in a number of ways and how they are made available is up to each individual publisher. Most publishers will have their own website and very often publishers will make their journals available via their own sites such as Cambridge Journals Online. Within each site, QMU students and staff will only have access rights to those titles that QMU subscribes to. Please note this won t always mean from volume 1 onwards. Sometimes publishers will create a database of their own journals and offer access to the whole database on a subscription database. Access to each database and it s contents are dependant on a subscription like the Emerald database. Then there are the databases who act as aggregators such as HighWire Press and Ingenta who host ejournals for various publishers. 4

5 Some publishers will allow free access to the archive of their electronic journal collections. Access to the free archive is often made available via a third party. Different publishers will allow different access to their resources. Increasingly open access sites are being developed. These are sites which provide access to ejournals which are freely available over the Internet where there are usually no print equivalents available. Open access sites are quality controlled or peer reviewed such as the Directory of Open Access and BioMedCentral. 5

6 Problems with access can occur for many different reasons there may be technical problems with the network at QMU or with the publisher s server. Issues may have arisen with the subscription and access could have been temporarily removed. Access to electronic journals is seamless when you are on campus or logged onto Remote Access and these are the preferred routes as not every publisher is Shibboleth compliant for off campus access. Occasionally, there may be a unique username and password for a specific journal title. Accessing electronic journals can be frustrating especially when things go wrong. If you encounter any problems with access then please get in touch and let us know. 6

7 The Library Services website is where you will find our ejournals A-Z list on the Library Toolbar. It is a full list that includes all the titles we subscribe to, those available via our subscribed databases, archive material which is freely available and those journals available to all via Open Access. 7

8 The ejournals A-Z page lists all the titles you have access to in a number of ways under a series of tabs. The Title tab is the default tab where you can access the full list in alphabetical order. If you know the title of the journal you are looking for, you can enter the title in the Find box or by clicking on the Advanced Search option. Subject groupings are available in a drop down menu via the Subject list tab. There is a Source List tab if you prefer to search the publishers or providers. Once you have found the title you are looking for you will see the source it is available from (sometimes this is more than one), the years accessible, publisher, ISSN and subject area. Click on the source to connect to the ejournal. 8

9 You will also come across ejournals when searching our databases. The databases available to you at QMU are listed on our web pages alphabetically on the Databases page and in subject groupings on the Subject Resources page. Conducting a search in one of our databases will produce a list of articles relevant to your search. QMU will have access to some of these articles but perhaps not all of them. 9

10 Sometimes you get lucky and you will see a direct link to the PDF or HTML of an article but not all the time. To find out if we have access to an article electronically, click on the check Linksource for more information link. 10

11 If we have full-text access to the article, Linksource will display the direct link for you. You can see on this screen that there is a link to the library catalogue. This is the default setting. If the article you require is not available electronically then you can search the library catalogue to see if it is available in the LRC in print. If we don t have a particular journal title available electronically or in print, you may still be able to request a copy of it through an Interlibrary Loan. 11

12 Not all journal titles are available electronically. Many are still only available in print so it s worth taking a look at the current issues on display in the LRC so that you can see the full variety of choice available to you. Not all ejournals are available for free. QMU pay a subscription to access the full-text to a large number of titles, which can be expensive and it is for this reason that we cannot subscribe to every ejournal that is available. Access to ejournals on-campus is seamless with the exception of one or two titles. Occasionally you will be asked for a username and password and these are available from the Service Desk in the LRC or by ing lrchelp@qmu.ac.uk. Seamless access is also available via Remote Access and this is the recommended route if you are off-campus. 12