Journals are regular (serial) publications, like magazines, that publish the outcome of original research and are aimed at other researchers or scholars. They can focus on a narrow field of study.
Journal articles often cover quite narrow topics within a field. They record the state of the art so will keep up to date with the latest concepts, findings, or trends, scholarly analysis or research. Find articles using Library Search with the Articles search function.
Journal articles undergo peer-review, which is a process of review by experts in the field (peers). It is aimed at validating the research prior to publication of an article, ensuring quality, originality, contribution to the knowledge base, and authority in a research article.
Journals and journal articles can be found using Library Search, however it does not discover content on all language/literature databases, so journal or bibliographic databases are preferred for literature searching.
Journal databases index and abstract articles in specific journals. Some are general and index journals across a range of disciplines, and others are subject specific and index only medical journals (or another discipline). Journal databases are not always full-text: some will include the full-text article, but others will provide an abstract (summary) only. If journal articles are not available, use the Library's free Get it for Me service.
Some journal databases provide citation information, which allows researcher to measure the usage and impact of articles in their research field, and to find related academic literature. Citation databases can be useful, but they are general in scope.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
MLA Coverage includes modern language and literatures, film studies, folklore and linguistics
Education Research Complete is useful for journal literature on second language teaching and learning; language acquisition and language development.