Using eJournals

On this page:

• Searching the eJournals catalogue

Other methods of searching for and using electronic journals:

• MetaLib and bibliographic databases
• Google Scholar
• Publisher/provider search options
• Special software and mobile devices

• Problems using eJournals

Searching the eJournals catalogue

The search box on the eJournals page will, by default, allow you to find electronic journals in our collection containing the title keywords specified. Advice on the range of search options available is shown in the box below.  The eJournals catalogue is also available in Quick search > Journals and as Find eJournal in MetaLib.

It is not possible to search for the title of a journal article using the eJournals catalogue. If you would like further information about how to search for journal articles or a general introduction to our journal collection, see our Journals page.

Search results

The results of your search will be displayed together with an accompanying link to the home page of the journal. Sometimes more than one link to a journal will be provided, depending on the availability of that journal from different publishers and service providers. Adjacent to each link will be a note describing the extent of the journal volumes/issues (and years) available online. Links to related journal titles can also be found in the results list. If you find that we do not have online access to the specific volumes/issues that you need, our Get It! button will lead to an option for checking our Library Catalogue to see if we have the journal in printed form.

On the search results page you will also see an information symbol link adjacent to each title that is displayed. This link provides bibliographic information about the journal in a pop-up window, including title abbreviations, and journal history in the form of title changes the journal has undergone.

Other methods of searching for electronic journals:

MetaLib and bibliographic databases

To find individual articles by subject, your best approach may be to use one of our specialist bibliographic databases. These include both wide-ranging general tools such as Web of Knowledge and subject-specific indexes such as Inspec, Medline, Psycinfo and many more. Quick search > Articles & databases provides easy access to databases and articles via MetaLib.

Google Scholar

This specialist Google interface allows you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, pre-prints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research and from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, pre-print repositories and universities.

Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature.

Google Scholar also automatically analyses and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

• go to Google Scholar (also available in Quick search > Internet)
• more information about Google Scholar

Publisher/provider search options

Many of our electronic journals are delivered by intermediary service providers (see list below) which themselves offer searching facilities across their collections. When using these sites you should remember that Information Services has usually negotiated full-text access only to a selection of their content. If you are asked for a username and password for a particular title it is unlikely that full-text access to that journal is available. If you are looking for a particular article, you will normally be able to find it by browsing for the year, volume, issue and page in your reference. If it is not a current article then you will often find links to 'previous issues', 'archive', or 'available issues' to gain access to older articles. Once you have found the particular article that you want you will usually have the option of reading a summary or abstract. The full-text of the article will often be made available to read as both a PDF file, or HTML (web format).

Electronic journal service providers include:

Special software and mobile devices

To be able to read the full text of articles, including all illustrations and special characters, you may need a special viewer, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Note: most full-text journals are encoded in Portable Document Format, or PDF. In order to view a PDF you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader

eJournals can be accessed and used on desktop computers and also on a wide variety of mobile devices, e.g., laptops, mobile phones, and tablet PCs. The ability to use eJournals on mobile devices, and to what extent, will depend largely on the device and its compatability with particular digital file formats and third party software applications (apps). IT Services provide advice and support for Mobile technology, principally smartphones and tablets. The Ask It service also allows members of the University to seek advice about mobile technology directly from Bristol's staff and student community.

Problems using eJournals

Please see our help and contacts page if you have a problem using eJournals, or wish to report an error in our listings.