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Journals at Swain and Online

Finding & Accessing Journals at Stanford University

Use SearchWorks, Stanford’s Library Catalog, to find journal titles available at Stanford. SearchWorks also includes links to online versions of journals and holdings information that shows what volumes and years are available for a title. SearchWorks does not contain details about individual journal articles. Search SUL Databases to locate journal articles.

  • Swain Journal List
  • Stanford University Libraries e-Journals
    • SUL Connecting from Off Campus to e-Journals
    • Report e-Journal Access Problem via Report a Connection Problem
    • Search Tips
      • Title abbreviations: You can search for a title by its abbreviation (e.g. J Am Chem Soc) as a title keyword search. Embedded terms are also retrieved in the title keyword field (e.g. chem. will retrieve biochem as well as chem.).
      • Short, common titles: A great way to find journals that have short, common names (e.g. Science, Nature) is to search for them by publisher instead of their title. For example, search AAAS and Nature as the name of the publisher to locate Science and Nature, respectively.
      • Advanced Search page: Allows you to specify if a term is a partial word, exact word, or exact phrase. You can also specify if term is at the beginning of a phrase or anywhere in a phrase. You are also able to search multiple fields at a time (e.g. title and publisher) and to limit search results by a subject category.
  • Lane E-Journals (Lane Medical Library)
  • Viewing e-Journal Articles
    While most users prefer to print PDF versions of articles, the web version may contain abstract/full-text links for cited references as well as links to high-resolution images, multimedia, and supplemental data. Different readers may be required to view articles. Unfortunately, errata are frequently not linked to articles (see Errata for Online Journal Articles in the Physical Sciences: An Empirical Study).

Services

Journal Title Abbreviations and DOI

Cancellations

Evaluation & Directory Tools for Journals

  • ISI Journal citation reports (Ranks Journals by Impact Factor) (Stanford only)
    Provides easy access to data that helps you evaluate and compare scholarly journals. JCR can show you the highest impact journals, most frequently used journals, hottest journals, and largest journals. Search by journal title, publisher, subject category, or country.
  • Ulrich's periodicals directory (Stanford only)
    Identify new journals, referred titles, and online titles in your discipline. Learn which databases or indexes to search for locating article level information in a journal.

Also see: Related Links

Full-Text Searching

Most publishers now offer full-text searching for their journals. Deciding where to search — a publisher site or an index is a key decision that impacts what is retrieved. Article level information on publisher sites is “invisible” to web search engines (e.g. Google). Below are some advantages and disadvantages of doing a full-text search for a journal on a publisher’s web site.

  • Advantages:
    • No lag time between time of publication and when article can be searched
    • Ability to search entire contents of an issue, not just research articles
    • Ability to search the entire text of an article by keyword (helpful for finding information about laboratory methods)
    • Helps provide quality control (e.g. all articles are refereed)
    • Efficient method to verify a citation
    • No search fees
  • Disadvantages:
    • Possible to miss relevant research without searching multiple sites
    • Key word searching can lead to overwhelming results
    • Inconsistent data (e.g. author names) may make it difficult to find all relevant articles
    • Potential gaps in coverage (early years may not be included)

Links to selected journal publisher sites are available on the Alerting Services page. A more comprehensive journals list is also available from Cambridge University. To learn more about full-text searching, see: Not Just Full-Text Articles: Comparing the Search Function Among Chemistry Electronic Journals’ Web Sites (American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Royal Society of Chemistry, Springer-Verlag, Wiley).

Titles Covered in Selected Databases

Knowing how many titles and what titles are covered in a database is a key factor in deciding which database to search. Knowing the lag time between when an article is published and when it is indexed is also important. In part, this is determined by how often a database is updated. Being aware of which databases index the contents of a journal cover-to-cover is also useful as some databases only index research papers.

Below are links to journal titles covered in selected databases. To search any of these databases, please go to the Databases page. Note that access to most databases is restricted to current students, faculty, and staff at Stanford.

Related Links


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