Finding E-Journals at Trent

E-journals are electronic journals, or online journals. Usually, this means that the entire journal is available to browse or read on your computer. It can also mean that you can search for full text articles from that journal, although you may not be able to see the entire journal.

E-Journals don't actually live on a Trent computer or on the shelves. The library pays for access to the journals from a server located somewhere else. When you connect to these journals, you must authenticate yourself as a Trent user in order to gain access to them. The Proxy Server looks after this authentication.

Not every journal published is available online. Many journals don't offer online access at all, and most charge subscription fees for access. Trent users only have access to journals that we have subscribed to, or that are available free to everyone.

E-Journals are actually complicated things for the Library to keep track of, and we do it in 2 places: TOPCAT (the library catalogue) and . Through these 2 services we attempt to keep track of each volume of each journal available to Trent, with appropriate links. Sometimes a journal is available from more than one source, and we maintain links to all available sources. You can use either approach to finding e-journals at Trent, and sometimes you'll want to try both.

Journal Titles Available Online - A Link on the Homepage to

When you click on Journal Titles Available Online on the library homepage or from the E-Resources page, you get a search engine associated with . Use this search engine to locate e-journals by title, subject category, ISSN, and vendor/publisher.

Note that Journal Titles Available Online searches at the journal level and does not search for articles on a topic (use an index for that). You CAN use Journal Titles Available Online to locate journals on your topic and then search within those journals for articles of interest, and there may be times when this is useful.

If you already have a citation for an article and you want to locate it, there's a citation linker in Journal Titles Available Online where you can enter information about a particular article and search for online access to it. The citation linker uses to link as closely as possible to the online article.

Search TOPCAT

All the journals that Trent Library subscribes to are listed in TOPCAT (the library catalogue), whether they're online, in print, or in any other format. You can search TOPCAT to find out if we subscribe to a journal in print, electronically, or both.

We can restrict our search in TOPCAT by using a "Power Search" and changing the "Location" to "Internet". A search of "periodicals" with this location finds over 6,000 titles:

E-journal subscriptions have a separate record from a print journal, so if we subscribe to both you'll see two records: one for the print and one for the online subscription. The call number for the online version will be "Online" and you can click on "Connect" to get to the journal online.

Not every journal that's available online will be listed in TOPCAT, because we don't always subscribe to them directly. Sometimes they're part an index package that includes some full text, or sometimes they're free. will usually find these ones for you.

Subject Resources

A large number of e-journals are available free online. Some of these are scholarly and reliable; others are not. When we discover a good title available for free, it may be listed in TOPCAT if we feel it is reliable and relevant to course offerings. Others are listed in our Subject Guides, along with other websites useful to the subject area.

E-Journal "Suites"

The Trent Library subscribes to a number of journal "suites" online. This means that we can go to one site to access a large number of journals. Examples of suites are the Elsevier, Springer (LINK), Wiley, MUSE, JSTOR, Oxford University Press, Cambridge, and Academic Press (IDEAL) groups. Scholar's Portal is a service which combines several of these groups.

In these suites you can use one search engine to locate articles in a number of journals at once. All articles you find will be available online. The links to these suites are found on our indexes webpage.

Some indexes have the full text of some articles included. Examples are Academic Search Elite, Academic OneFile, CPI.Q and CBCA. These are not generally considered e-journals, because the full issue of a journal is not browseable. They are not normally added to TOPCAT, but can find them. These indexes will direct you to articles which may be online, in print, or may not be available in this Library, in which case you would use RACER to obtain them.

Resource Linker

In Fall 2004 we introduced a new service which links to online journals and articles using OpenURL technology. With this service there is a significant improvement in our ability to link to online resources. There are 3 benefits to this service:

1. A reliable list of available e-journals at Trent can be generated and updated regularly. This list is available from our homepage under E-journals and our E-Resources page.
2. A blank form can be used to input the journal or article citation information and the linker will check to see if it's available online. This form is also available from our homepage, under Citation Linker.
3. Online indexes have links to this service, so that when you find a citation for an article you would like to read, click on to see if Trent has access to it. Not only will it find online journals, but a link to TOPCAT will search for the print format, too.

This service is run for all Ontario University Libraries from a server at the University of Toronto, as part of Scholars Portal.

Updates

Staying on top of electronic journal availability is a challenging job. If you come across a link that no longer offers access, we'd appreciate your letting us know. And if you find a good title we don't know about, send it to us and we'll check it out. Send an email to .

Off Campus Access

To access online journals from a computer that is not on the Trent network, you need to authenticate yourself as a valid Trent user. Read the instructions for accessing resources from home on our Help webpage.

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Last Modified: November 16, 2009
Maintained by , Thomas J. Bata Library.