What is a journal article?
- What is a journal article? (slides)Learn more about journal articles --why they are important and why we cite them the way we do.
Article Indexes
- America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: America: History & Life with Full Text in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). 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.
- Bibliography of British and Irish History Online This link opens in a new windowThe Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British Empire and Commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present. It is the successor to the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History, available online from 2002 to 2009. The Bibliography aims to be as comprehensive as is practical for publications since 1900 and has been enriched by co-operation with other projects. Data from the London's Past Online project were added to the database in January 2003 and the first batch of data from Irish History Online was added in August 2004, with further batches from both projects being added later. From the end of 2006 the Bibliography has co-operated with teams working under the auspices of the Scottish Historical Review Trust which will henceforth edit the primarily Scottish titles in the database.
- Historical Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: Historical Abstracts with Full Text in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). 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.
- ATLA Religion Database with ATLA Serials This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: ATLA Religion Database with ATLA Serials in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). The ATLA Religion Database is a comprehensive database designed to support religious and theological scholarship in graduate education and faculty research. The file contains citations from international titles and 13,000 multi-author works in and related to the field of religion. It also includes a full range of index citations to journal articles, essays in multi-author works, book reviews, and Doctor of Ministry projects from ATLA's print indexes: Religion Index One (RIO), Religion Index Two (RIT), and Index to Book Reviews in Religion (IBRR). Though coverage is from 1949 to the present, not all publications began in 1949.
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: MLA International Bibliography in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches).Indexes critical materials on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Proved access to citations from worldwide publications, including periodicals, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies.
- Anthropology Plus This link opens in a new window
Alternate version: Anthropology Plus in the classic EBSCO user interface (best for exporting more than 50 results or combining saved searches). Anthropology Plus combines Anthropological Literature from Harvard University and the Anthropological Index, Royal Anthropological Institute from the UK. Anthropology Plus provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. The index offers coverage of all core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals. Coverage is from the late 19th century to the present.
What are article indexes?
Article indexes are a type of bibliography. The purpose of bibliography is to list documents, usually published documents like books and articles. This type of bibliography is more accurately called "enumerative bibliography". An enumerative bibliography will attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, within whatever parameters established by the bibliographer.
Think of a bibliography as a guide to the source base for a specific field of inquiry. A high-quality bibliography will help you understand what kinds of sources are available, but also what kinds of sources are not available (either because they were never preserved, or because they were never created in the first place).
For more information on the role of bibliography in historical research, see our guide to Bibliography and Historical Research.
Bibliographies can be as short as a few pages, or as long as several hundred volumes. Bibliographies can also be published as databases, and these are the bibliographies that are often called "article indexes" or "indexing and abstracting services" because they index the contents of journals:
Because article indexes are a form of bibliography, and not a catalog, you can use them to discover articles from journals the Library doesn't even own. An article index, therefore, enables you to cast the widest possible net within whatever field the article index covers. If you discover an article from a journal that the Library does not own, you can request a copy of the article through interlibrary loan. Most online article indexes include links to interlibrary loan, but you can also go directly to interlibrary loan if you have a complete citation (see below).
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
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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
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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:
- University of Illinois Library CatalogUse the Library Catalog to identify books, journals (but not journal articles), microform collections, and digital collections owned by the University of Illinois. The Library Catalog is the primary tool for exploring the collections of the University of Illinois Library, the second largest academic library collection in the United States. In the Library Catalog you can search for books by subject, and you identify the location within the Library of a particular book or journal. Books and journals are organized in the library by subject. Each item is assigned one or more subject headings and a unique call number. Subject headings are standardized terms from the Library of Congress. The call number is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification or Library of Congress Classification. Boolean operators must be capitalized if used: AND, OR, NOT. Interface automatically truncates some search terms unless Boolean operators are used within the same query line. You can also browse catalog records by call number, creating a "virtual shelf browsing" experience.
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.