Library Guides: CHM321 Research Skills Guide: Journal databases

Why should you use journal databases?

Journal databases:

Are the best source of academic or scholarly information for your assessments
help you locate peer reviewed articles
Are subject specific, so that you get more relevant results
Have many options for refining results

You can find the Library's databases on the Journal Databases page.

Databases are grouped into subject areas. The Science databases will be particularly useful for this subject.

Try it now

Go to the Academic Search Complete database, and try searching for – "chemical laborator*" AND hazard* OR safety (quotation marks "" are used to search for a phrase, asterisk * is a truncation symbol used to search for variations of a word, AND is used to combine concepts & OR is used to search simultaneously for synonyms, for more information please see the Search Techniques page).

Alternatively, you could try searching for the key concepts you have identified from your own assessment topic.

Look at the HTML and PDF links to access the full text of the article.
If you cannot find the full text click on the Find it button to check if the article is available elsewhere.

Searching in a database

News databases

ANZ Newsstream This link opens in a new window
A ProQuest database featuring the full-text of Australian and New Zealand newspapers. Previously called ANZ Newsstand
This database includes titles from Fairfax (including The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald) and News Ltd (including The Australian, The Adelaide Advertiser, and The Herald Sun), plus leading regional and local newspaper titles from Australia and New Zealand, and transcripts and wire feeds from ABC programs.

Coverage varies, but most newspaper content is available from the mid- to late-nineties.

Other databases with online full-text newspaper content are Trove, Factiva, and Newspaper Source Plus.
Factiva This link opens in a new window
A global news and business information service, with most material available in full-text. It covers science, health, education, the humanities, and other subjects but has a focus on business, including business news, and company and industry research.
Factiva is produced by Dow Jones, a leading global provider of economic and financial information.

The database has full-text content from newspapers, newswires, business journals, market research reports, analyst reports, and websites.

It includes material from :
* Australian newspapers, including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Business Review Weekly
* US newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal
* Magazines, journals and trade publications, including Forbes and Newsweek
* Newswires, including AFP, Reuters, and Dow Jones
* company reports
* other content including TV and radio podcasts; and major news and business information websites, blogs and message boards.

Coverage varies but goes back as far as 1980.

There is a useful online Help Guide available from ProQuest. It includes help pages on Simple Search, Search Builder (Charles Sturt's subscription defaults to Search Builder), Results pages, Companies/Markets, and Sample Searches.

NOTE: Charles Sturt Library has only 3 concurrent-user licences to Factiva. If you can't get access, try again later.

Other useful databases

ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
An Elsevier database of scientific content from journals and books, which gives comprehensive coverage of the sciences and social sciences.
Material is organised in the major subject areas ("domains") of:
• physical sciences and engineering
• life sciences
• health sciences
• social sciences and humanities.

Charles Sturt Library does not subscribe to all of the content in ScienceDirect, but the subscription does include the full-text of thousands of journals and hundreds of eBooks. Both the journal and eBook content cover a range of subjects.

To browse the collection, go to Journals & Books at the top of the main page. You can filter your browsing by journal or book title, domain and subdomain (subject areas), resource type (articles and book chapters), and access type.

You can search using basic or advanced search. Search results are available as journal articles and book chapters.

You can filter results to full-text content by ticking the box(es) for Subscribed publications and/or Open Access articles. You can also filter by article type or to book chapters.

For journal article results where the full-text is NOT available, click on the article title to go to the full record, then click on the Find It button to search for the full item via Primo Search.

Most full-text journal content is available from 1995 onward and, for some journals, the content is available from Volume 1. New titles are added regularly.

Elsevier also produces the Scopus database, a huge abstract and citation database, and the eBook collections ClinicalKey Student: Nursing and ClinicalKey Student: Medicine.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
A multi-subject abstract and citation database of research literature. Known for its citation-tracking and bibliometric features.
Scopus is an abstract and citation database of research literature which offers coverage of more than 22,000 journals, and more than 150,000 books, from more than 5,000 publishers. There are nearly 70 million records and 1.4 billion cited references. Most records date since 1996 but Scopus has recently added records dated from 1970 - 1995.

Scopus does not in itself include the full-text of articles, but many records in a results list will have a View at publisher link. If that link doesn't work, use the Find it link to search for the full article via Primo Search.

Subject coverage includes:
* Life Sciences
* Health Sciences
* Physical Sciences
* Social Sciences & Humanities.

Scopus has a number of specialised features relating to bibliometrics which are mainly used by higher degree researchers. But one feature that might have wider application is the ability to use the View Cited By function to find articles that cite your selected articles(s). You can also sort your results list by citation count.

A note on access for academic/research staff: If you are academic/research staff and require access to your Charles Sturt researcher profile, please use this link - https://www.scopus.com - and sign in using the "Access through your Institution" option. Type Charles Sturt University into the search box and follow the prompts.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
A collection of 6 databases available in the Thomson Reuters interface, the most significant of which are: Web of Science Core Collection; Current Contents Connect; MEDLINE; and SciELO Citation Index. These databases can be searched together or individually.
Details of the 6 databases are:
* Web of Science Core Collection - a collection of 5 citation indexes and 2 chemical indexes, where you can, amongst other things, find citing articles (ie articles that have cited a specific reference);
* Current Contents Connect - a current awareness product which includes tables of contents and citations from journals from all disciplines;
* KCI-Korean Journal Database - features research emanating from South Korea, and covers about 2,000 scholarly journals;
* MEDLINE - the well-known international health and medicine database, produced by the (US) National Library of Medicine;
* Russian Science Citation Index - covers Russian research in fields such as engineering, materials science, and ecology, with more than 600 journals indexed;
* SciELO Citation Index (Scientific Electronic Library Online) - a program of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation for the cooperative publishing of open access journals, which includes regional journals from Latin America and the Caribbean as well as titles from Spain, Portugal and South Africa.

These databases can be searched together ("All Databases", which is the default) or individually. To change to a single database, click on the drop-down arrow beside All Databases in the main tab-bar of the Web of Science screen.

Most of the articles in this databases don't have the full-text attached, but you can use the Find it button, situated beneath each record, to locate the full-text in another online database or in a campus library print holding.

Please note: Web of Science does not work in Internet Explorer 6 or 7, or Internet Explorer 8 or 9 when running in Compatibility View. If you wish to use Web of Science with IE, you should update the version, and, in IE 8 or 9, hit F12 and check that your Browser Mode is not set to Compatibility View.

Last Updated: Feb 2, 2024 1:54 PM
URL: https://libguides.csu.edu.au/CHM321
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