Even thinking of using journals in a research project may produce in you a shudder of horror. You imagine sitting down in front of piles of printed journals, thumbing through each one in an anguished quest for something (anything!) on the �The Implications for Generation Y of Max Weber�s Approach to the Sociology of Cities.� Hours later, in bitterness of heart and soul, you will emerge, red-eyed, with one article that is only vaguely relevant. Journal research used to be done that way when your grandfather was a wee lad in school. Now things are very different, due to the development of journal databases.

These databases are created this way: Indexers sit down in front of piles of print journals or their electronic equivalents (often related to a specific subject discipline, such as psychology or history or religion) and create a metadata record for each article. The metadata is loaded into the database, thus making it searchable. By doing a search, you can generate a list of articles from various journals that are relevant to the subject you are studying.

Approaching a journal database means first being able to �read� its interface. The interface is what you actually see on the computer screen when you search for the data in a journal database. It includes the screen display, search methods, and so on. Interfaces change constantly. Data doesn�t. What this means is that the screen may look different the next time you use the database. The instructions on use may be different. Even the methods you need to follow to search the index may be different. The data inside the database is the same, but the means you use to extract it may be brand new.

• Go over any instructions on the screen.

• Start with a keyword search and identify 2 or 3 results that look like they are relevant to your research question/thesis.

• Click on the titles of these relevant articles, one by one, to open the full records.

• Are there suggested subject heading links beside or above the list ofresults? Are they hyperlinked?

• Look for a �Thesaurus,� �Subjects,� �Browse Subjects,� or �Indexes� link.

• If you are going to search by keywords, what sorts of Boolean operators are in use in this database? Is phrase searching allowed?

• Try a search on a broad basis first, perhaps inputting a subject heading or only one keyword. If you get more than about 500 �hits� (citations to individual articles), look for a means to refine or narrow your search by adding more words.

Here is an interface from Academic Search Premier, an EBSCO journal database:  

A journal article citation is simply a description of an article with sufficient information to help you find it. While the format of a citation may vary, this is the information usually provided:

Badke, William. �Can�t Get No Respect: Helping Faculty to Understand the Educational Power of Information Literacy.� The Reference Librarian 43, no. 89/90 (2005): 63-80.

Here it is broken down:

Badke,William.�Author of the article.