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There are several ways to access journal articles. The way you do it depends on what you need.
Some possible scenarios (brief examples of each are shown below):
Important information about journals
There are thousands of journals in nursing and related areas of medicine and health. There are thousands of additional journals in education, psychology, and social sciences that may have valuable information for you. One way all of these journals can be categorized is placing them into one of two classifications: (a) journals that the library “Owns” or (b) journals that the library “Does not own”. In the case that we “own” the journal you will be able to obtain the full text of articles from the journal directly or through a database. In the case where we “do not own” the journal, you will have to obtain the full text of the article from another source, such as interlibrary loan or a service called Get-It-Now.
The above can be illustrated with the database CINAHL (Cumulative Index for Nursing and Allied Health Literature). CINAHL indexes about 5300 journals. When you do a search in CINAHL it will look through every journal for your search terms. CINAHL has the actual articles (“full-text”) for about 1400 journals. That means it does not have the full-text for about 3900 journals. When you do a search and results are displayed, if the article you want is in one of the 1400 “full-text” journals, you can obtain it directly. In this case there will be a link to the PDF or other online format of the article. If the article is in one of the other 3900 journals, you will have to obtain it through another database, interlibrary loan or other manner. In this case there will be a link labeled “Journal Finder”. Journal Finder will provide alternate options for access.
Below is an example. In the results of a search I did, an article I wanted (in the journal Health Affairs) did not have a PDF. So I clicked on Journal Finder and Journal Finder located the journal in three places. However, in looking at the coverage dates, note that the issue we want is not available. So my choice here would be to order the article through interlibrary loan.
If I wanted to browse or search in a journal, such as Health Affairs, I would look for it in Journal Finder on the library home page, as seen below in the WCSU version.
Note: Use these links to go directly to Journal Finder at WCSU or SCSU. (Will open in new window)
The image below shows what Journal Finder found. I could click on any of the first three the links in the left column and go to the relevant database.
When I arrive at the database, I could search in the journal or browse by year and issue. Below is an example in Academic Search Premier.
Again go to Journal Finder. Click on Advanced Search and scroll to the bottom of the page. Fill in the form with the citation information.
In this case you want to search in a database. The database you begin with depends on the search topic. You might want a nursing database, an education database, or both. You could access the databases from the library home page at SCSU or WCSU.