How can I find journal articles?

For most biomedical and health care questions, you will find articles efficiently by searching PubMed or MEDLINE (which we get via Ovid). Search by topic, title, journal, author, and limit by date, age group, language, type of publication, and more. There are many databases available; see the FAQ on searching beyond PubMed for descriptions of some commonly used databases.

PubMed/MEDLINE indexes journal articles (no book chapters, conference abstracts, or dissertations). The articles generally come from scholarly journals, rather than popular magazines such as Psychology Today, Time, Newsweek, etc. Indexers use a highly structured thesaurus (vocabulary) to identify key elements of articles, and to aid searchers in finding specific articles. Using the subject headings or MeSH terms from this thesaurus can be very useful.

If you already know some information about a specific article, such as the journal title and page, consider using the Single Citation Matcher. Fill in as many or as few of the boxes as you like. Lane's eJournals page offers a similar search.

You can also select a journal from the stacks or from the eJournals page and scan the tables of contents or search within that journal.

For assistance with search strategies, selecting a database, or refining a search, contact your library liaison or the .

To find the actual article, once you have done a search, click on the Stanford button with the swooshy S next to each citation or abstract. This takes you to a menu that will help you find the article online or in print, or request it via DocXpress.

mtinsley, July 31, 2008