Journal articles are one of the main ways scientists and researchers communicate their latest research findings to the wider research community. The How to read a journal article guide will help you read and understand journal articles: how they are structured, where to find specific information, what peer review is and how you can critically assess the content.
When reading a text or data, you are not a passive participant, but an active constructor of meaning. Exhibiting an inquisitive, "critical" attitude towards what you read will make anything you read richer and more useful to you in your studies and your life. Thus critical reading is designed to help you to understand and effectively engage any literature you read. Check out our Critical reading guide for more information.
There are several ways to find full-text articles available through TU Dublin Library's subscriptions:
In this demo, we will look at how you can find a journal article from a journal article citation.
Here is an example of a journal article citation.
This citation consists of several important pieces of information, including: article author(s), year of publication, article title, journal title, volume number (issue number), page range.
We are going to use the journal article title to find the full-text version of this article through TU Dublin Library's Search All.
Locate the search box on the Library website homepage. This is Search All, which searches across most of the library's resources.
Enter the journal article title into the Search All search box and press enter.
Explore the results to locate the journal article. In this case, it is the first entry in the list of results. Compare the title and other details, such as author(s), journal title, year of publication and volume and issue number to be sure it is the correct journal article.
If you are using Google Scholar to locate journal articles, make sure you configure the Library Links in the settings to Technological University Dublin, Find@TUdublin. When you search, this will link to full-text articles covered by TU Dublin Library's subscriptions.
Watch this short video on setting up Google Scholar to search for full-text articles available through TU Dublin Library.
Open access journal articles are journal articles that have been made freely available online by the author(s) and / or publishers. There are many open access journals available online while many publishers provide open access versions of journal articles.
To locate open access versions of journal articles, try installing the following extensions or bookmarkelts in your browser:
Or try the CORE Discovery tool for open access versions of the article.
The Directory of Open Access Journals is an index of diverse open access journals from around the world.
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0