Finding ejournals and articles

This guide is to find ejournals and articles by:

1. Searching for an article or journal using specific details, such as the author name or title.
   OR
2. Searching by subject area across journal collections or within a particular journal title 

If you are not sure what an ejournal or article is, take a look at Understanding ejournals.

Finding a particular article in an ejournal

To check whether the full text of a specific article is available online:

• Go to Library Search.
• Enter the article title in the search box and click 'Search'.
• You will see one or more links to the article if it is available via the OU Library.
• If the article you are looking for is not in the first few results, refine the search by going to ‘advanced search’, changing the dropdown option from ‘Any field’ to ‘Title’, then click ‘Search’.
• If you still do not see the article in the results, try refining your search using the filters for publication date, resource type etc. For example, if you know the exact title of the journal title, select it from the list of journal titles.
• When you locate the article, you can view it by clicking on ‘Full text available’ or, where available, ‘Download PDF’.
• You may be asked to enter your Open University Computer Username and password before you can go any further.
• If the article is not on the first page of your results, try searching for the ejournal title that the article appears in by following the next set of instructions below:.

Finding a particular ejournal title

• Go to Library search.
• Enter the ejournal title in the search box and click 'Search'.
• Ensure the title matches exactly, e.g. Journal of Spatial and Organizational Dynamics, where ‘organizational’ must be spelt with a Z rather than an S.
• Filter your results by limiting the ‘resource type’ to 'Journals'.
• If the ejournal title is available via the OU Library there might be more than one link to it. Clicking the title link will list which years of the ejournal are available through that link, so check that the article you are looking for is within that date range. The ‘Full text available’ links will take you to the journal interface where you can navigate to the year, volume and issue number you require.
• You may be asked to enter your Open University Computer Username and password before you can go any further.

Finding articles on a particular topic

A good starting point to locate articles on a given topic is Library Search, which searches most of the Library's resources. This might give you too many results, or results that aren't relevant. Individual databases are a great place to search for a particular topic as many of them focus on specific disciplines. To find a relevant database to search, try the Selected resources for your study page. A list of useful databases is provided for different disciplines.

For more help with the process of searching, read Finding resources for your assignment. You can also attend online training or watch recordings of previous sessions from the Training and Events page.

You can learn more about databases on the Understanding databases page.