North Hall Library

 

Journals & Articles Help

Have a citation? Watch the video on how to locate the article.

Locating a Journal by Title

If you know the title of the journal, newspaper or magazine, search the Journals List below or, on the library homepage use the Journal Title Search tab, to see if it is available online or in the library.

EBSCOhost Tutorials

EBSCOhost provides a number of tutorials to their various databases. Here's the link to what they have. We don't have all the databases they have tutorials, just so you know.

Confusing Terms: Journals vs Articles

Journals, magazines and newspapers are all made up of individual articles. Generally, if you are just starting your search, you are looking for individual articles on a topic. You do this by looking in a database.

Newspapers contain shorter articles covering very recent news & events. They also cover local news. Think New York Times or Philadelphia Inquirer. The library has specific databases for newspaper articles and we have some newspapers in the library. You may also find newspaper articles in databases like Academic Search Complete.


Magazines contain articles ranging from popular topics to professional or trade information. Magazines frequently contain ads, and the articles in magazines are not considered scholarly.Think Time magazine, People, or Pennsylvania Game News.

In EBSCOhost, they use the term "Periodical" to indicate an article from a magazine.


Scholarly Articles, aka Peer Reviewed Articles or Academic Articles are articles that have been reviewed by scholars before they were published. Think Journal of the American Medical Association, or Journal of Criminal Justice.

If you are looking for Scholarly Articles, you won't find them in a newspaper or magazine. You need to find them in an Academic Journal. Some databases only contain scholarly articles (usually these are in the sciences). Some databases don't contain any scholarly articles (newspaper databases for example). Many databases allow you to limit your results to scholarly articles. If you are in doubt about whether a specific journal or articles is scholarly, ask at the Library Service Desk.