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Finding Journal Articles

You've successfully used Orbis to identify books: now you'll see how to identify articles on the same topic.

First some definitions:
A serial is a publication that begins at a point in time, and continues publication, usually at regular, established intervals, with the intention of continuing publication indefinitely.

A periodical is a serial that's published three or more times a year.

Magazines and newspapers are general terms for types of periodicals, both describing publications of interest to general readers. Newspapers are often published more frequently than magazines and usually in a tabloid format.

Scholarly journals are publications that report the research of scholars and are often quite discipline-specific.

To identify articles in serials, you need to use bibliographies and indexes.

Unlike catalogs, which describe what's in a particular collection or group of collections, bibliographies and indexes list sources that are not restricted to a given library or collection. Bibliographies list works with some relationship to each other (for instance, materials on a certain topic, or by a single author, or published in a particular country or in a particular time period) and generally include materials of various types (e.g., books, book chapters, articles, dissertations). Indexes generally provide access to the contents of individual periodicals or newspapers, or to the contents of multiple periodicals and newspapers whose subject focus is similar. They differ from bibliographies in that they contain citations to only one type of publication -- articles, book reviews, and editorials in periodicals -- rather than to a range of materials, e.g., books, articles, and maps.

Indexes and bibliographies come in both print and online form, and are legion. Academic Search is an online index (sometimes called a database) providing access to articles in periodicals, magazines, and scholarly journals across a wide range of academic disciplines. Starting at the library home page, click on Databases & Article Searching. This will present a browsable alphabetic index to all databases to which the library has secured licensed access, and a list of selected general databases. Click on Academic Search. The page you reach gives you information about this particular database and a direct link to it. All the databases provided as resources by the library should have such an information page. Note what this page tells us about Academic Search: years of coverage, how to find a list of what journals are covered, the kind of access offered, any restrictions on access, related sources, and where to go for help.

Using an Index
There are two parts to finding an article at Yale: first, identifying the article you want, and second, actually putting your hands and eyes on it. The first step requires an index or bibliography, the second usually (but not always) requires Orbis and a stack guide.

For the first part, connect to Academic Search. The first screen is the basic search screen, with a box in which to enter key words. The Guided Search allows you to build searches by combining terms and limiting to date, journal, or full text. There is also an "expert" search screen that prompts you to specify fields for searching and allows you to build searches slightly differently. For now, stick to the basic search screen. Type in richard rodriguez, and leave the radial button For Standard Search selected. The result is 50 citations. Some of these are articles by Rodriguez, some are about him, and some have nothing to do with him but are by or about people with the same name. This should remind you of the results from our Orbis keyword search on rivers: a keyword search simply looks for the occurrence of the word anywhere in the record, it does not specify a field, and it does not use a controlled vocabulary.

Go to page 3 of the results screens, and follow the link from the title of the article in entry 49, a record for an article from Harper's Magazine. This is a typical citation, giving title, subject, source, author, abstract, accession number, standard serial number, and the name of the database. At this point, what's your next step? How do you get this article? You'll have noticed that a number of the entries, including entries for other articles from Harper's, include a full text icon and/or a full page image -- the actual text of these articles is available online. So your next step would be simply to click on the icon and read the article. But your article, the one you want from Harper's, does not have a full text icon -- it's not available online in this database. What other possibilities are there?

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