What is a journal index?
First: What it's not. Searching these databases is not the same as searching "the internet." We use the internet to access these resources, but these are all subscription-based services that are only available to you as Hamline students--your tuition money pays for them!--and, once you are no longer a student, because of publisher restrictions, you will not have access to them after you graduate. Take advantage of them! Your public library will also have a variety of article databases as well.
What it is: Each of these indexes has a finite list of journals from which they organize articles so that we can find them by looking up an author or subject. There are hundreds of different indexes produced and they each have different missions in life. For example, Reader's Guide (you may have used those green books before to find articles) indexes articles in popular magazines, such as Good Housekeeping and Psychology Today. The more academic/scholarly journals are indexed in more specialized databases such as Art Index, ERIC, Education Full Text, and Applied Science and Technology Index.
Choosing an index. Every index has its own scope and mission. Some are more broad in coverage, e.g. Academic Search Premier, and some are more specialized, e.g. Education Full Text. Some like Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, ERIC, and PsycINFO, contain not only journal articles, but other information, such as dissertations, grant reports, and conference presentations. You may occasionally see the same article in more than one of these, but they do not duplicate each other. They each have a unique list of journals they cover.
Your first decision, then, when you determine that you need to find journal articles on your topic is: which databases do I use? If you are writing a short paper, you may only need to use one. If you are writing a longer paper, if the topic is more specialized (not likely to appear in the primary journals of the field), or if you are approaching it from a multi-disciplinary perspective (e.g. checking the psychology literature), you will most likely need to use more than one database. More will be covered on the Specialized Databases page
Try This: You can learn alot about what's in a database (or not in) by looking at the list of titles they index. Go to the H.W. Wilson page, choose Reader's Guide, then click on Display List. Note that it lists magazines such as 'Teen, Backpacker, and Baby Talk. This is not the database to use for academic research! Also note that it includes the dates that the magazine was added to the index and--in some cases--when it stopped.
Now try a different database from the same list: Education Full Text. Different journals altogether, right? And here is a list of journals included in ERIC. These are both education-related indexes and there are some journals that are indexed in both, but they do not duplicate each other.
The lesson? Part of your decision-making process as you conduct research is which database/s you are going to search. And it's usually best to search more than one; different database, different journals and, sometimes, a whole different perspective on your topic.
Also--the databases available to you through Hamline provide access to scholarly, academic journals that have quality control procedures for the articles they publish. This is very different from "the internet," where you can't always be sure of the quality or, sometimes, even the origin of the information.
** For students accessing Bush Library's databses, please read below
Passwords/Proxy Server: Access to Hamline's databases, if you are off-campus, will require you to login to what we call our Proxy Server. To learn more about the Proxy Server and what you will need please click here.Only our First Search databases require a separate Authorization and Password. If you need this information, please contact the reference Desk at 651.523.2375
If there are any other databases for which you need a password, contact the Reference Desk (651-523-2375). We will need the CLIC library code from your Hamline ID to verify that you are a current student at Hamline.
Start Here: Education Full Text (available under Databases by Subject: Education). Education Full Text (formerly Education Abstracts) is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles of at least one column in length from English-language periodicals and yearbooks published in the United States and elsewhere. English-language books relating to education published in 1995 or later are also indexed. Abstracting coverage begins with January 1994. Abstracts range from 50 to 300 words and describe the content and scope of the source documents. Full-text coverage begins in January 1996.
You can learn a lot about the content of a particular index by looking at the list of journals they index. To see a list of journals included in this index click on Journal Directory link from the menu on the left side of the search screen.
Search Strategies for Journal Indexes. The buttons on every database are all a little different, but the same search strategies discussed in the CLICnet demos are effective in these. You can use the subject search (although it might be called descriptor instead), you can search by keyword (although it might be called search anywhere instead), and you can use a keyword search to locate a good record, then look at the subject headings/descriptors for other terms to use.
Education Full Text:
Searching Basics, Search Results, Obtaining Articles
Using the Thesaurus and subject searching.
Practice using Education Full Text before moving on to next lesson
To go to next lesson on Specialized Databases click here
2003
Kate Borowske/Kristofer Scheid
Last Updated 2009
