Journals are academic publications on a specific topic e.g. Diabetes Nursing, Practising Midwife, or Journal of Intellectual Disabilities. Issues appear regularly e.g. weekly, monthly, or quarterly. They are high-quality sources of up to date information.
Each issue will contain a number of articles or papers on very specific topics within that one subject. There are different types of journal articles (reviews, research, commentary/opinions, book reviews etc.).
A lot of journal articles are peer-reviewed, which means they are evaluated and critiqued by researchers and experts in the field before being published. The research or evidence from these peer reviewed journals allows us to change or improve the care we give to patients and clients as part of evidence-based practice.
Background facts and history about a clinical condition or care procedures can be gleaned from textbooks. However, current clinical practices relating to these topics should be located from more up to date, evidence-based sources, such as journal articles, clinical guidelines, best practice statements, and systematic reviews. Generally you should try to use research that has been published within the last five years, but this will often depend on the topic under investigation and the amount of research evidence currently available within that subject.
There are a number of different places and ways to search for journals and sometimes no one way is the best. Journals are published on the publisher website and you can go to a journal website directly and search within individual journals. Sometimes this can be useful if there is a very specific journal on the topic you need to find information on, however it can be very time consuming to do this across lots of journals and so ideally we want to be able to search multiple journals at one time.
You can search multiple journals together in the following locations:
See the tabs on this page for more information about finding journal articles in LibrarySearch, Google Scholar, and journal publisher websites. Please see the separate page on Databases for more information on what these are and how to search in them effectively.
LibrarySearch is our library catalogue and has access to a wide range of different resource types, including journal articles. There is both a basic and advanced search feature and you can tweak your search results to only show you journal articles. You can use LibrarySearch to either search for a specific journal article that you already have the details for, or to do a topic search. we have further guidance and support on using LibrarySearch to find journal articles.
Google Scholar is the academic section of Google. It indexes scholarly material on the internet, including books and journals, however some of the material it indexes is not of good academic quality so you need to carefully evaluate the material you find on there.
Google Scholar can be useful to find open access journal articles that are not indexed in LibrarySearch as not every open access journal or article is indexed in our catalogue.
You can also link your Google Scholar results to the full text ejournals we purchase here at Edinburgh Napier to give you access to subscription sources via Google Scholar more easily. Our Google Scholar guide will show you how.
The links below are to journal publisher platforms where we have access to some of our journal subscriptions. As well as searching in databases it also a good idea to check here as we sometimes subscribe to journals directly as not all journals are indexed in databases.
We do not always have access to all the content on these platforms, just select titles, so you will not get full-text access to everything. Sometimes the platform will allow you to narrow your search results to only content available to Napier staff and students.