Journals are published periodically, e.g. once a month. They are often published by commercial publishers, but the publisher can also be an institution or organization.
Journals address different groups of readers and have different purposes and use. Amelia and Science are entertainment respectively popular science journals and their target group is anybody interested. Other journals are more specialized and directed toward professionals, students or researchers in a certain field, e.g. Sygeplejersken and
European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing.
When a journal article is “peer-reviewed”, its quality has been checked by other scientists before it was published. This system is most common in technology, medicine and science.
Journals almost always have an ISSN-number (International Standard Serial Number) which is unique for the journal and which is used for identification. The ISSN makes it easy to tell apart two journals with the same title or trace a journal that has changed title. An ISSN always consists of eight numbers with a hyphen in the middle: 0268-3962.
Apart from the ISSN you state year, volume or year and number to identify a certain number of a journal, and also pages if you want to identify a certain article. It can for example look like this: 2003(88):2, p.132-53 In order the following is stated: Year (volume/year): number, pages.
How can I find journals?
On the Library web site you can check which printed journals are held at the Library: Information resources > Journals. You can also search for journal titles in the Library catalogue. You can not borrow journals, but students and staff at Blekinge Institute of Technology can copy articles free of charge. Borrow a copy card at the information desk.
In the list of journals on the library web page and in the Library catalogue you can see which journals are held at the library, but you can not search for specific articles from the journals. Instead, articles are searched in special databases. See the Subjects part in the Search guide to get tips about in which databases you can search for articles in your subject field, and in the Databases part you can get tips on how to search for articles in databases.
In LIBRIS you can see what journals are held by Swedish libraries. Choose the extended search form, publication type periodicals and enter the journal title in the title field.
Jenny Löfkvist
2007-10-22
