Woodruff Library subscribes to thousands of periodicals (scholarly journals, magazines and newspapers). For the most part the contents of these periodicals are NOT FREELY AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET.

What is a scholarly journal? One in which the articles:

• are written by experts/scholars in the field
• include notes and/or a bibliography
• are reviewed by an editorial board of outside scholars before publication
• are geared to scholars/researchers in the field

THE CONTENTS OF BOOKS AND PERIODICALS ARE NOT SEARCHABLE IN EUCLID, THE LIBRARY CATALOG.

EUCLID provides the titles and call numbers of all the periodicals in the library collection, (and links to the full text of the journal, magazine or newspaper if we have it available electronically). But if you do a search in EUCLID on "women and Shakespeare," you will find BOOKS but NOT JOURNAL ARTICLES on this subject.

Indexes are the tools used to find articles in periodicals (journals, newspapers, magazines). An index will tell you which journals have published articles on your topic.

Indexes come in both print and electronic versions.

Electronic online indexes are called databases. Although these databases have a web-interface, they are NOT FREELY AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET. They require a paid subscription. However, Woodruff Library subscribes to a great number of databases, so as an Emory student, you can freely access these databases.

Many of our print indexes are found in the reference collection on Level 2 of the Woodruff Library, though some are in the Stacks (Levels 4-9).

The easiest way to select the best index/database is to use the Databases@Emory page. Choose your subject from the drop down box and click go, and you will get a list of databases that cover your subject. A short description of the database is included so that you can make sure it's going to meet your needs.

You can also refer to the Research Guides for lists of indexes/databases recommended by librarians.

Print indexes give you citations to articles and do not include the full text of the articles themselves. And while some databases include the full text of articles or links to the full text, others give you citations only or a mix of full text and citations.

Citations include brief information about an article, like the article title, author, journal title and date. Sometimes an abstract, a brief summary of the article, is included with the citation.

Make sure to keep track of your citations because if you use the information from an article in your research paper, you will need to document that article in your bibliography.

Here's a sample citation:

Some electronic databases actually provide, or link to, the full-text of at least some articles. The description of the database, which you can get from the Database Locator, tells you whether there is any full-text.

Many databases that don’t have full-text articles have buttons like this next to the citations.

The Find It @ Emory button next to a citation means that one of the Emory Libraries should own at least some issues of the journal mentioned in that citation. Clicking on the button will bring up a menu of Emory’s holdings for that journal.

If you can't get the full-text of the article you need from the database or if there's no SFX link, you can still check to see if the Library owns either the print or electronic version of the journal that the article appeared in.

Check the journal title in the EJOURNALS database first, to see if we have an electronic copy of the journal. The EJournals database lists all of the journals in electronic format subscribed to by the Emory Libraries.

If we don't own an electronic version of the journal, we may still own a print copy. Search the JOURNAL TITLE in EUCLID (click on periodical title under the search box).