Journals can also be called serials, periodicals or magazines. Journals are published at regular intervals under the same title.
Academic journals publish articles relating to a specific subject area and are usually peer reviewed (also called refeered). This process ensures the articles they publish represent the best scholarship currently available.
How do I know whether an article is scholarly / peer reviewed or not?
This video gives a good introduction to the differences between popular magazines and scholarly and peer reviewed journals.
Freely available resources from the Royal Society of Chemistry include:
Chemical Sciences Article Repository
Open PHACTS - draws together multiple sources of publicly available pharmacological and chemical data
Interactive Periodic Table
Learn Chemistry is a collection of open education resources (OERs)
Try the BASE academic search engine, it is especially good at finding open access sources
Search ChemSpider for over 30 million chemical structures
Use GoPubMed to search in PubMed - you'll get results faster than searching directly
A database is simply an online collection of information.
It generally contains journal articles, but most databases also hold book chapters, book reviews, reports, and conference papers. Sometimes only the abstract, or summary, of a journal article will be available in a database but often you will be able to read the full text of the article too.
We all use Google to find information in our private lives but in college you will be expected to find credible, academic quality information for your assignments. Not all good quality information is available free online. The Library pays for access to the information in subscribed databases just as we pay to buy the books you see on the shelves. Using these databases will save you time and effort and because the information has been evaluated for accuracy and credibility you can rely on its quality.
Individual journal articles are not listed in the library catalogue.
Use MultiSearch to find articles on your research topic.
To see if we subscribe to a particular journal title use the Publications tab in MultiSearch.
There are lots of good open access sources you can use as well - try:
RIAN Pathways to Irish Research
and don't forget our own DkIT open access research repository
Found just what you need but we don't have access to it here?
Don't worry... check our Inter-Library Loan service for options on how to get access to it.
