Simmons carries many paper and microfiche copies of journals, newspapers and magazines in its print collections, and many electronic periodicals in its eresources. Perform the following steps to find citations and fulltext of articles you need for your research.
With so many magazines, journals, and newspapers, how do you find the articles you need for your research topic? Simmons currently subscribes to 120 electronic databases, which together provide citations to articles in approximately 19,000 journals. They also include the entire fulltext of some of these articles. In this section, you will learn how to figure out which databases are likely to yield citations to relevant articles on your topic. If you do not know which databases are appropriate to use, start with Resources by Subject. Scan the list to identify the broad subject heading that covers your topic. For example, if you are looking for nursing articles on a particular health topic, select Nursing. Here you will find a list of databases that contain articles from journals or newspapers on the subject of Nursing literature. Before selecting a database, read the accompanying description, which provides important information such as:
If all the citations you find include the fulltext of the article you need, print, save, or email it to yourself and go no further. If you have found citation for articles that you now need to find fulltext for, compile it with any other citations you might want to find fulltext for and continue to the next step.
A citation includes information
such as author, article title, journal title, date, and other important
data identifying
the article.Here’s
an example of a citation for an article titled Wallace Stegner: the
teacher and the artist, written by T. Bontly and appearing on pages
421-437 in
volume 107, issue number 3 of The Sewannee Review published in Summer
1999:
Bontly, T. Wallace Stegner: the teacher and the artist. The Sewanee Review
v. 107 no. 3 (Summer 1999) p. 421-37
An abstract is a brief description of what the article contains. It can
help you get a better idea of whether or not an article will be useful
to you before you go through the process of locating the fulltext. Here's
an example of an abstract for the article referred to in the citation
above:
The writer reminisces about his mentor Wallace Stegner. He recalls participating in Stegner's writing class at Stanford University and being assisted and advised by Stegner subsequently in his career. He reflects on Stegner's own writing and argues that, at its best, it carries the authentic mark of originality and power that lifts it above critical categories and reaches toward genius.
Once you have a citation for the article, follow the steps below for locating the entire fulltext of the article.
Go to the library catalog, and select Title/Journal Title.
Enter the journal title and click Submit Search. If Simmons holds the journal, you will see it listed as a link. If Simmons does not hold the journal, skip the rest of this section and proceed to the section Finding the Article Outside Simmons.
Click the journal title link, and you will see the holdings record for the journal. The record will tell you which issue dates are available in print, microfilm, and/or online. If the article is available in print or microfilm, note the call number for the journal. Journals and magazines are located in the Periodicals collection on the first floor of the library. If the article is available online, click the link to go to the journal in the database that contains your article. Browse the journal for the date, volume, and issue you need to find the article, or search the database by journal or source title, article title and/or author for the article you need.
Refer to this section if Simmons does not have access to the journal or particular issue you want.
If library in the consortia do not carry the journal and/or issue you need, or if you are unable to visit a library that carries the article, you can submit an interlibrary loan request, and we will find it in another library and have it sent here for you to borrow. Remember that a request can take up to 2 weeks to process.
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