Where’d My Journal Go?
Have you ever looked for a scholarly journal online but not found it? You’re not alone. VCU Libraries subscribes to thousands of titles, but they don’t all look the same online, and their full text is located in various places. Depending on publisher decisions, licensing and other requirements, our holdings for a particular journal might be spread across multiple platforms, ranging from databases to publisher websites to scholarly repositories.
The quickest way to find out if we have a journal is to check the VCU Libraries Search. Simply type in the journal’s full title, and the odds are good that a link for your journal will appear in the first page of results. Sometimes abbreviated titles work, but not always, and journals with very short titles can also be a challenge.
The item record for a given journal (click the title for a full description) will typically state where full text is found, and which years are available where. The record for American Studies, for instance, indicates that the full text of the journal can be found—except for the most recent four years—in JSTOR. The most recent four years—as well as issues back to 2007—can be found in Project Muse.
The JSTOR/Muse combination is well represented in VCU Libraries journal holdings. In addition, you can often find older volumes of journals in JSTOR, even if the publishers (commercial, scholarly society, or otherwise) do not make their content available via Project Muse. Please note that the interface for journals may change over time, depending on the publisher, and on the platform or platforms where they make their journals available.
The moral of the story? We often have the content for journals you want, but not necessarily all of it in the same place. If you have questions, contact VCU Libraries and let us help you.
By John Glover, humanities research librarian
Categories Journals