Finding Journal Articles: Home

Finding journal or newspaper articles involves a few more steps than finding books, but is a requirement for university research, and is always worth the effort.

The first thing to know is that you cannot find individual articles listed in the library catalogue. You must use a different tool (often called a journal article database) to do this. Using an article database allows you to search hundreds of different journals at once!  The library pays for subscriptions to hundreds of different article databases, some of which are devoted to a single subject (such as Sociological Abstracts or Engineering Village) and others which cover a range of subjects (such as Academic Search Complete).

USearch is a cross-platform search tool that allows you to search the Library Catalogue and a variety of databases at the same time. Your search results will include the library's online and print collections.

All databases will provide citation information (ex: name of the article, article author(s), journal name, page numbers, etc.). Some databases will provide abstracts (article summaries) which are very useful in determining the value of the article. Many, but not all, databases will include the full-text of the article. You can read the articles online, print them, save them, or e-mail them to yourself.

Journal Article Databases

Searching within a specific database will limit your results by focussing on a single subject area. Most databases contain articles from many different journals at once.

If you're not sure which database to use, visit the Research Guide for your subject to see which databases are recommended by your librarian.

Already Know Which Database You Want?

You can go directly to that database through the library's A-Z list.

Already know which Journal Title you want?

If you know the title of the journal that you need, you can use our Catalogue or our Electronic Journals Search. 

You can use USearch to find articles from many of our databases all at once. You are almost guaranteed to find something.

However, depending on your needs, the number of results you get may be overwhelming or off-topic, in which case it might be better to use a subject-specific database.