Academic databases: how to find journal articles
If you are researching a topic and need journal articles, you need to use academic databases to
search for them, rather than individual journals. The databases will search across thousands of
journals for you.
You can access them via the databases Quick Links option on the library homepage. You will see the
A-Z menu of resources. If you are not sure which one to use, two really useful databases are
ProQuest Central and SCOPUS, these are large databases which contain a lot of journal information
across all subjects. Or you may choose to use a smaller subject specific database such as PsycINFO
for Psychology or CINHAL with Full-text for health. If you are not sure which to use have a look at
your subject page where you will see a list of databases relevant to your subject, recommended by
your subject librarian. You can click Resources by Subject to view those. There will also be help
guides for using those databases.
We are going to have a brief look at ProQuest Central as an example. Click on P and scroll down to
ProQuest Central. You’ll see the link and a cribsheet and video showing how to use it. There are also
details of subject coverage.
So click on the link to access the database. At this point, particularly off-campus, the University of
Bolton’s electronic resources login will appear, enter your usual University username and password
and login. When you click on a blue link, you leave the Library website and enter a publishers’
website (in this case ProQuest), they all look slightly different but the principles of navigating them
are the same.
Tick Select All and click on the orange button. This brings you to the search screen. Search for
diabetes AND “young people”. I want the database to search for young people as a phrase rather
than two separate words which is why I have used the speech marks. Click on the search icon to view
the list of results.
You can see that ProQuest breaks the results down in a list of resource types. You will be primarily
interested in Scholarly journals, so click on the link to remove all of the other resource types out of
the list of results and leave you with a list of journal articles. If you wish to view one, click on the fulltext pdf link and the article will open, you can print it, save it or read on screen.
One of the most important things is to select the right keywords, for example, you might want to rerun the above search using children or adolescents instead of “young people”. You’ll probably need
to run two or three searches to get a good set of results.
There are lots of other functions in ProQuest Central, so take some time to explore them. Use the
cribsheet and video to help you.
For further help with finding information via the academic databases please see our range of
cribsheets and screencasts or contact the duty librarian on the Library Subject Help Desk in the
library, telephone 01204 903404, email subjecthelp@bolton.ac.uk