What is a journal?
What is a journal article and how does it differ from a book? Why do journal article citations include volume and issue numbers? If you need to refresh your memory of these concepts, here's a quick overview..
Article Indexes
To do as broad a search as possible for relevant journal articles, try these options (bear in mind that you will need to use the built-in limiters to restrict your results to peer-reviewed journal articles):
- Easy Search (from the Library's home page)
- EBSCO DiscoverySearch across all article databases (and other bibliographic resources) hosted on the EBSCO platform.
To find articles from scholarly journals in the field of history, try these two article indexes/databases:
- Historical Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. Provides indexing of more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955.
- America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes journals from 1964 to present and includes citations and links to book and media reviews.
Article Indexes for related subject areas
- ProQuest Black Studies Center This link opens in a new windowThe ProQuest Black Studies Center includes the Black Studies Periodicals Database, which includes citations for articles in Black periodicals going back to 1902, as well as an online index to Black literature spanning from 1827-1940, the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience (a database of studies, articles, images and essays covering important topics), and the full text of the Chicago Defender newspaper from 1910-1975.
- EconLit with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Provides citations for articles and dissertations in more than 620 journals, books, and working papers on economics, plus full text for more than 560 journals, including the American Economic Association journals with no embargo.
- Hispanic American Periodicals Index (HAPI) This link opens in a new windowContains citations to articles in more than 400 scholarly journals published in Latin America or treating Latin American and U.S. Hispanic topics.
- History of Science, Technology & Medicine This link opens in a new window
History of Science, Technology and Medicine reflects the influences these fields have had on society and culture throughout time, from prehistory to the present. Updated on a monthly basis, this essential database includes records of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, dissertations, serials, maps and other related materials.
- PAIS Index This link opens in a new windowThe PAIS Archive includes carefully selected resources to help users identify and locate information about significant political, economic, social and cultural issues affecting international and local communities, countries, governments and society. Its broad topical scope and retrospective coverage complement more specialized databases that cover the humanities, health care, agriculture, sociology, history, and many other disciplines, providing historical perspective on many of the 20th century's public and social policies. Also, the PAIS Archive database contains references to monographs, periodical articles, notes and announcements, and analytics, and the original historical subject headings have been retained within the file for enhanced searching capabilities.
- ScienceDirect This link opens in a new windowA web database for research that contains abstracts, tables of contents, and full text of articles in the physical sciences and engineering, life sciences, health sciences, and social sciences and humanities.
- Worldwide Political Science Abstracts This link opens in a new windowProvides abstracts and indexing of the international literature of political science and international relations, along with complementary fields, including international law and public administration/policy. Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers, and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,500+ serials publications.
Digitized Journal Collections
There are several major collections of full-text electronic journals. In these databases you can browse individual issues of journals, or you can do a search across the entire database. Most of the journals in the following collections are scholarly journals:
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Provides page images of back issues of the core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Users may browse by journal title or discipline, or may search the full-text or citations/abstracts. New issues of existing titles and new titles are added approximately on a weekly basis. The University of Illinois has access to the following JSTOR collections: Arts & Sciences I-XV, 19th Century British Pamphlets, Business IV, Global Plants, Hebrew Journals, Ireland, Life Sciences Collection, Lives of Literature, Security Studies, Struggles for Freedom - South Africa, Sustainability, and World Heritage Sites - Africa. - Project Muse This link opens in a new windowFull-text articles from more than 200 scholarly journals in history and the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. Disciplines covered include literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. A brief bibliographic description of each title is given. Searches can be conducted across the full text of all journals in the database.
- Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Periodicals Archive Online is a major archive that makes the backfiles of scholarly periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences available electronically, providing access to the searchable full text of hundreds of titles. The database spans more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages.
From Citation to Article
If you have a citation for a journal article (for example, from a footnote in another article), and you want to obtain a copy of that article, you can start by searching to see if we have online access to the article. If you have the DOI, you can quickly check to see if the Library has online access to the article by pasting in this url: http://www.library.illinois.edu/proxy/go.php?url=http://dx.doi.org/ as a prefix to the numerical DOI. It will look like this:
http://www.library.illinois.edu/proxy/go.php?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1351651
If you don't have the DOI, you can use the other information from the citation, including the title of the journal in which the article is published, the title of the article, and the author's name, to search in:
- Journal and Article LocatorSearch for journals and journal articles by name or DOI.
- Easy SearchBroad based search for materials accessible through the University Library
If this fails, you will next need to determine whether the Library owns a copy of the specific issue of the journal in which the article appears. Therefore, the most important piece of information at this stage is the title of the journal, not the title of the article.
To determine whether the Library owns the journal, you will search the regular Library Catalog:
If the Library does not have a print copy of the journal, then you will use your complete citation to request a copy through interlibrary loan:
- ILLiad (Interlibrary Loan)If the item is not available in the Illinois catalog and it is not available through I-Share, then your next stop will be Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery. Login to Interlibrary Loan using your NetID and password. If you are requesting a book, then select "Request a Book". If you are requesting a journal article, then select "Request a Photocopy". Be sure to fill out as much of the form as possible. You'll be notified by email when your item is ready to be picked up. If you requested a journal article, it will probably be sent to you electronically as a PDF.
Interlibrary loan can usually obtain a journal article for you very quickly (much faster than for books), sometimes within one day.