There's something about new web products or services, once their benefits have been tried and trumpeted by a few. Word spreads fast and people want it yesterday. Take full-text electronic articles as an example. E-journals first appeared in academic libraries about the mid-1990s and like most things online have grown exponentially since that time. And many of you either are already reading, or are itching to read, articles from the comfort of your office or home. Keeping this in mind, let me share a few caveats and tips.
While it's true the number of online journals increase daily let's not forget that the print world has had a couple thousand years head start. For most disciplines, limiting your research to electronic sources means you miss the majority of the periodical literature in your field. So don't say a complete bye to paper yet!
And note that periodicals with both print and electronic access don't necessarily offer you the same thing in both formats. For the most part, print is still seen as the primary starting point and so tends to offer the most complete and original copy. Typical examples of things sometimes missing in online versions of periodicals are graphs, charts, illustrations, page numbers, editorials and letters to the editors.
On the flip side electronic versions may have value-added features like providing hyperlinks to footnotes or other relevant articles. Cost can also pose a challenge. Tenopir, an expert in online journals, notes that "Recent web hype has led many to believe that electronic journals are free. Actually, journals that bear no direct cost to the user are uncommon among scholarly publications".1 Of course the library picks up most of these costs but a lack of funds makes it a puzzle to decide which journals to subscribe to in print, which electronically, and which in both formats.
A final thought, not really a caveat, but a point worth pondering is how using online journals may affect the way we conduct research. For instance, current searching technology gives one fingertip access to millions of articles and can jump you right to the relevant point in a chosen article. These kinds of capabilities may encourage a sort of skimming approach to information as opposed to considering it in a very contextual way.
Lest the caveats scared you off let me confess that I quickly found an e-journal or two to help me write this brief column, and very handy they were too.
If you want to locate scholarly periodicals the major resource to consult is the Association of Research Libraries' Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals and Academic Discussion (kept at the Reference desk, Scott library). Hot off the press, this source lists 3900 peer-reviewed journal titles available electronically. A fairly detailed subject index allows a search for e-journals in a particular field and full access and publication details are provided.
To browse through online periodicals at York, your best bet is to check out our E-journals database that contains over 8000 titles. The database is accessible from the library homepage (www.library.yorku.ca) by selecting Electronic Library, Electronic Journals. Currently you can check a journal alphabetically by title and find out how to access it online. It may be a web journal we've subscribed to in which case you just click on the hyperlink provided. Or the journal may be available in one of our full-text databases (eg. Expanded Academic, ABI Inform, Newscan, Canadian Periodical Index). The database also notes which years or volumes of the periodical are available in full-text.
A coming attraction of the E-journals database is a subject index that will allow one to search our journal holdings by specific discipline. A final source to consider is the website All Academic (www.allacademic.com). As the name suggests, this site is an index to free scholarly material (including articles) on the net. When an item comes up, its publication type is identified, full author qualifications are provided and the citation is listed in standard bibliographic format.
So hopefully now you're set to get comfortable and surf the multitude of
e-journals available...
1 Tenopir, C. (1997) The complexities of electronic journals. Library Journal. V122(2): 37.