Griffith Library

The library provides good support for postgraduate students through a range of research support resources1.

If you know the title of a journal article for which you are searching, you can copy the title into the library search box (it has keywords on the top of the box), check the journal box and click on the search button. If the article is there it will tell you whether or not the library has access to the full text or only the abstract. If it has free text and you select the article you will be prompted for your Griffith username and password in order to access the remote database that holds the article. Most often a PDF.

When you do a search, you will be presented with a page or pages of search results. For each item found you will see an entry with the title of the book or paper and an indication of whether or not the library has the full text available2. There will be two icons on the top right of each entry in your search results: a magnifying glass which if you click on it, will give you more information about the item; and a folder with a + sign on it. If you click on that, the bibliographic data for that item will be stored in a temporary folder which you can download and import into whatever bibliographic software you are using.

The other thing that will happen when you do a search is that the Library database will treat the title like a list of keywords (doh!) and it will suggest a number of titles it thinks are close to what you are after.

There is an option to do an advanced search. I often use that to get to a particular journal and just browse the most recent papers.

You can also do a search of the Griffith library catalogue using EndNote3 This is handy because you can simply retrieve the full bibliographic information into your EndNote library for any references you locate. You won't need to type a thing. This is for books or reports held by the library. The other library I often use to locate a reference for a book is the Library of Congress. You can connect to it also via EndNote and, if you find the references you are after, you can easily add them to your EndNote library.

The other point to make is that the library subscribes to a variety of databases which hold various journals. This is how you obtain access to the full text of journal articles. You can sign on, i.e. join each of these databases and they all offer email alerts in which you can obtain notification of the contents of any journal as it is published. The best way to see how useful this is, is to give it a try. For example, the SAGE collection has a number of education journals that might be useful to your areas of interest.

You may find some journal articles via a library search but for which there is only an abstract. It is sometimes worth trying a Google search for the title because some academics publish their writing online on their websites or on sites like Academia.

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