Journal articles are a form of scholarly communication. Researchers use journals to share their work with others interested in the field. When your professors do research, they plan and execute it carefully, then they write up the results and insightful conclusions in a manner that is accepted, and expected, by others in the field. Examples of journals in health areas are American Journal of Public Health and American Journal of Health Promotion. 

WCSU has access to several thousand journals and it is not usually practical to search on a journal by journal basis. It is more effective to search in a database, which is a collection of journals and possibly other types of publications (books, conference proceedings, reviews, etc.) 

Databases for Health Promotion: Click Here

Databases provide a mechanism by which you can search for articles, generally using search terms in a variety of fields. Search terms are usually text and may be in fields such as keywords, topic, abstract, title, subject, authors, publisher, date, and more. Most databases are similar in the way they operate, though they may name the fields differently (keyword vs. topic), and they often vary in visual appearance. Some databases provide access to the full text of the article, while some only provide information about the article, called the citation, such as title, author, journal title, and more, as well as an abstract (summary.)

Examples of databases relevant to Health are CINAHL and Medline. They will find and display results for your search. Within the results it will tell you if the article is available in full text electronically. If so it can be downloaded, otherwise another manner must be found to obtain it, such as interlibrary loan (ILL).

Ideally the articles you need will be available in electronic format, but this is not always the case. If an article is not available electronically in a WCSU resource there are other options. One is to see if we have the article in a print journal/resource. Another is to order the article through interlibrary loan (ILL).

NOTE: There are situations when it is practical to go right to the journal, such as when you already know the article title or page numbers, or simply want to browse the latest volumes.