Posts tagged articles

You run across article suggestions all the time when you are doing research - articles that professors recommend to you, articles cited in bibliographies and works cited lists, and more.  Here's how to find the text of those articles.

There are two things that you need to track down the text:  the name of the journal and the volume/year when your article was published.

Here's how:

From the library homepage choose the OSU Library catalog from the Quicklinks:

Do a title search for the journal title.  Click the radio button that says Journal/Magazine/Newspaper title:

I did a search for the Journal of Business Communication.

If we have the journal, you will get a record that looks like this:

At the top of the box, you will see links if we have a digital or online subscription.  In this case, we have two.  One extends all the way back to 1963, and is available through the most recent issue.  The other runs from 2004-2007.

At the bottom, you will see if we have print (hardcopy) holdings.  In this case, we have one set running from 1986-1997, and then another from 2003-2007.

Get an online copy

Click the link that includes the volume/year you want.  At this point, you will usually browse to the volume or year you want.  You may also get the option to search for your article.  We get online journals from a lot of different places, so they will look different when you click through to them -- just look for an "archive," "back issues" or something like that to browse to the one you want.

In this case, we have online issues available through EBSCOhost.  To get these, you would browse to the year you want:

If we click the other link, the Sage link, we would "select an issue from the archive."

If you are off-campus you may have to enter your ONID information to access these subscription-only journals.

How to get a print copy

If we do not have an online subcription, double-check to make sure that OSU has the volume/year you need.  Then write down the call number and find the journal like you would if you were looking for a book.

The most recent issues of journals are kept in a current journal area in the middle of each floor, so check there too.  If you have any trouble finding a print journal that should be there, ask at the reference desk.

If you are on a branch campus, or if you are an e-campus student, and you live more than 30 miles away from Valley, you may request that articles from print journals be delivered to you.

From the library catalog again, when you are at the journal you want, click the Request button on the top of the page:

This will bring up a form, the bottom half of the form allows you to request a specific article.  Choose Extended Campus as your pickup location.

Good luck!

So you are searching in an article database, and you find the abstract for an article you want, but the full article is nowhere to be found?  Don't get frustrated!  If the OSU Libraries have the article anywhere, you can frequently find it with just a couple of clicks.

Here's a sample set of search results from Academic Search Premier.  I'm using this as an example, but the basic set of tips here will work in all kinds of article databases, not just EBSCOhost databases.

The third result on that list (marked with a green arrow in the image above) has the full-text available.  For any article with a link that says Full Text, or PDF Full Text, or just PDF, or HTML Full Text (or similar) - you're done.

The other two results, though (marked with pink arrows) don't have that full-text link.  For these articles, you want to click the link marked with the little green circle - 360 Link to Full Text.  This link lets you search for the article in the library's other databases and online subscriptions.

Here's what you will see if you click on the 360 Link to Full Text button for the first article in the example search above:

You are now looking at the page for that article in a different database.  The pink arrow is pointing at the full-text link (just labeled PDF in this database).

After you click the 360 Link to Full Text link, the next screen will not always look the same, depending on where it finds your article.  For example, here's another example.

This article is in the ScienceDirect database, and the full text link is in a tab at the top of the article page.

Unfortunately, the button's not magic, and it can only find articles that the library has access to.  If we do not have a digital subscription to the source you're looking for, you'll see a page that looks like this.  At this point, you can click the link provided to seach the OSU Library Catalog to see if we have a print (hard copy) subscription:

If we do not have the article you want, we can get it for you from another library.  We will always do everything we can to get OSU students, staff and faculty anything they need to be successful in their classes and research at OSU.

By checking a couple of boxes on a search form, you can improve your odds of finding the sources  that will work for an assignment requiring "peer-reviewed" or "scholarly" articles.

This trick won't guarantee that you find scholarly articles, but it will improve your odds by filtering out a lot of sources that are clearly not scholarly.

From the library homepage, choose Databases from the Quicklinks list.

This will work in most EBSCOhost databases.  If you are not sure which one you want to use, Academic Search Premier is almost always a good starting place.

Do a search on your topic.  TIP:  use just 1-2 important keywords.  Don't limit your results too much by adding too many search terms.

At this point, you might want to try a couple of different sets of keywords to see which one gets you the best results.  If you don't have enough results, try eliminating keywords.

Once you have a decent set of results, set your limits to get rid of the non-scholarly sources:

On the right side of the screen, you should see these two ticky boxes:

• * Scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals
• * References Available

Check both of these boxes.  The first one will limit to journals EBSCO thinks are peer-reviewed or scholarly.  The second one will limit to articles that have bibliographies available.

Here's the same search, with those limits attached.  Notice that the total number of results decreases from 786 to 64.

If you aren't sure how to get to the article from the results list - help is here.

I can't emphasize this enough, though - everything that is published in a peer-reviewed journal is not  peer-reviewed.  In addition to peer-reviewed, research-based articles, journals provide book reviews, website reviews,  editorials and opinion columns.  These might be useful for your work, but they aren't considered "peer-reviewed" articles.

If you're not sure if a particular article is peer-reviewed, that 's a great question to ask your professor or a librarian.