Finding articles on a particular subject area

If you are looking for articles on a particular subject area, or for an article for which you do not have the complete bibliographic information, try the following steps:

• Search a journals index database such as PCIFT (Periodicals Content Index Full Text) or Ingenta. For help on accessing and searching such databases see using electronic resources. Library catalogues do not usually contain entries for individual journal articles and so should not be used.
• The form in which the results of your search are displayed will vary between databases. The results may include a citation and abstract of the article, or you may also have a direct link to the full text of the electronic article. This example result from the Proquest  database has all these options:

• If you are provided with a list of article citations and abstracts you will usually have the option to select, or in this example 'mark', the relevant titles and print them out. If you do not print them out make sure that you note down the bibliographic information, which is the article title, journal title, year, month, volume number, part number and page numbers.
• You can now use the citations to check if your library holds the article or can provide access to it electronically. Refer to 'finding a printed article' and 'finding an electronic journal article' for help. Remember, your library will not necessarily hold every journal title listed in an index. In this situation look at the next page, 'finding articles in journals not held in the library'.