Library Guides #2
Journals
Revised February 2014
To write good essays, you need journals! The online journals databases give you access to journal
citations and full text for many articles from home or at Vose. This guide explains the basics of
journals and instructs you on using the EBSCO journals database. There are practice exercises
available on Moodle. To find these, go to www.voseonline.com and instead of logging in, choose ‘log in
as a guest’. Next, scroll down until you find Library Skills.
What are journals?
Journals offer the latest ideas in a subject area. They are basically scholarly magazines, appearing several times a year with
each journal focusing on a particular topic – for example, Journal of New Testament Studies focuses, obviously, on the New
Testament. The most reliable journals are ‘peer-reviewed’ – that is to say, each article is sent to other experts in the field for
comments and corrections before it is published.
‘Print journals’ are the physical copies of a journal. We have subscriptions to over eighty print journals at Vose. The arrivals
of the last week are displayed with the “New Books” display, located just as you enter the library. The current issues of each
journal are on display near reference; the back issues are placed upstairs, arranged alphabetically. All journals are now
available for loan, although there will be a delay for the many journals without a barcode.
‘Online/ electronic journals databases’ are indexes to print journals as well as providing full text for some of the articles. Full
text means you can view the article on the computer. These databases have many records called ‘citations’ which record the
details of journal articles and other information.
Why use journals?
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Journal articles provide more up to date information on a subject. Before scholars publish a book, they often test
their ideas in journals. Thus journals are publishing ideas before they’ve appeared in a book.
Journal articles are more specific in their subject matter. You might be researching a very specific topic for your
essay; even if there’s no book published on the topic, there’s probably a journal article.
Journals are where subjects are debated. You’ll find scholars responding to each other’s ideas directly in a journal.
It will give you a good idea of how a debate is unfolding.
Journals contain book reviews. If you’re grappling with a particular book and its ideas, reviews can be very helpful.
What are the databases?
Vose Library subscribes to four journals databases, although two of them use the same interface, EBSCOHost. The
databases accessed through EBSCOHost are ATLA and the Religion and Philosophy Collection (RPC) while the other two
databases are Proquest Religion and Australasian Religion Index. There is a separate library guide for the Australasian
Religion Index.
In this guide, we are focusing on the EBSCO databases, which are the largest two. When you search, you probably won’t
even notice whether your results are from ATLA or RPC as they look the same and are intermingled.
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ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials
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Library Guide #2: Journals
ATLA is the American Theological Library Association; librarians from it index articles from many journals and
chapters from many books. The ATLASerials subscription gives us more full text articles attached to the citations.
The database contains 1.6 million bibliographic records, including 630,000 article citations from 1,777 journals (587
currently indexed), 260,000 essay citations from 18,600 multi-author works, and 575,000 book review citations.
Unlike RPC it indexes the essays in a lot of multi-author books as well as journals. Full text is provided for more than
440,000 electronic articles and book reviews from 220 journals.
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Religion and Philosophy Collection (RPC)
Religion & Philosophy Collection provides extensive coverage of such topics as world religions, major
denominations, biblical studies, religious history, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of language, moral
philosophy and the history of philosophy. Religion & Philosophy Collection offers 300 full text journals, including
250 peer-reviewed titles.
Logging on
To login to the databases in the library or at home (internet connection required) follow these steps:
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On the Vose website (www.vose.edu.au), choose the library tab, and then click on ‘Databases’, and select
‘EBSCOHost journals databases plus ebooks – students and staff only’.
A ‘Login Required’ window will open. Your username is firstname.surname (Jo Smith is ‘jo.smith’). Your password
is the last five digits of your student number.
Searching
Basic search
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The search defaults to a basic search. Enter your search term in the ‘Search’ field; you don’t need to worry about
capitals or words like ‘and’ or ‘the’.
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Usually, you should limit your results to ‘Print journals held by Vose’ and ‘Full Text’ by ticking the boxes shown here.
We have entered our holdings of print journals, meaning you can limit results to journals we have. By adding ‘full
text’ you will also get the results which already have the article attached in electronic form.
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Click on the results which seem most relevant to get the full citation. If the citation has full text, you can view the
whole article on the computer. If it doesn’t, you need to take a note of the journal title, date and page numbers. You
then need to find the physical copy of the print journal.
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The default is for results to be sorted by relevance. You can sort by date or author as well by choosing an option
from the ‘Sort by’ function. ‘Relevance’ is usually best.
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If you have too few results, try fewer terms or broader terms. Eg: instead of ‘archaeology evidence Canaanite
religion’, try ‘Canaanite archaeology’.
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Library Guide #2: Journals
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If you have too many results, try narrowing the search with one of the subject headings or limiting your search to
recent years or scholarly publications. You will find the limiters on the left. You may also need to try more search
terms.
Advanced Search
An advanced search lets you search particular fields (title, author etc). You need to change the search to ‘Advanced’
at the start.
For example, if you want to see everything written by Scot McKnight, you could search for ‘McKnight, Scot’ and
select ‘AU Author’ for the field. This will limit your results to articles or Ebooks by him, instead of including articles
about him as well.
Another helpful search tool is the truncated search – ‘Aust*’ will search for everything starting with ‘Aust’, including
‘Australia’, ‘Australian’, ‘Austria’.
Search options
For both basic searches and advanced searches you can choose search options. These will help you get more
precise results.
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If you don’t get many results, you might want to choose ‘Also search within the full
of the articles’.
For much research, you will be more interested in articles than reviews. You may
wish to restrict your ‘Source Types’ and remove reviews. Choosing ‘Academic
Journals’ and not ‘Magazines’ will mean you do not get results from more popular
level publications like Christianity Today.
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Finding Essays in Books
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One of the drawbacks of restricting your search to ‘Print journals held by Vose’ and ‘Full Text’ is that you will
miss out on results from essays in books.1 If you are a confident user, you may wish to remedy this by
performing another search for essays in books only. 2
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In general usage, people tend to use the terms ‘articles’ and ‘essays’ interchangeably, but in the case of the ATLA database,
‘articles’ are pieces of writing in journals while ‘essays’ are pieces of writing in books.
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Although the Vose library catalogue lists the contents of many recent books, it does not do so for most older books. Please
be aware that Vose does not have all or even most of the books listed in the ATLA database
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Library Guide #2: Journals
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At the first search screen, click on ‘Choose Databases’ (see below, on the right) and deselect (untick) Religion
and Philosophy Collection, and eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) so that only ‘ATLA Religion database with
ALTASerials’ is selected.
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Make sure the limiters for ‘Print journals held by Vose’ and ‘Full Text’ are not selected. Go down to ‘Limit Your
Results’ and choose Publication Type ‘Essay’.
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All the results you get will now be essays in multi-author books. (Misleadingly, EBSCO puts a ‘periodical’ label
next to each – but they are not ‘periodicals’; they are essays in books.) If one looks relevant, click on the citation
to get the full details. The title of the book is called ‘Source’ in the citation.
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You need to check the Vose catalogue for the title of the book the essay is in. If we don’t, you could also check if
Murdoch or Trinity have a copy.
Emailing and saving results
Rather than going to physically locate each article as you find a citation, it is more efficient to save all the abstracts you want
and then locate the articles all at once. You can do this by saving abstracts to your folder. The symbol looks like a yellow
folder and is in the right hand corner of the screen.
Once you have all the abstracts you want in your folder, you can choose to save them or email them.
Citations are only saved to the folder for your current search period. However, you can set up your own account to save
searches permanently.
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Library Guide #2: Journals