Finding academic articles
As perhaps some others of you did, in July I completed an online survey about how I accessed academic journal articles. Here is the final report.
The main conclusion is that readers are going in greater numbers directly to the publisher websites when they want to find new articles. This is true of me. It also indicates that people use academic databases when they want to find citations, which is also true for me.
There are a number of journals I check out periodically, and I tend to go straight to their websites to find out if there are new articles appearing. Years ago I would accomplish the same by physically going to the library, which I now do far less frequently. When I need to dig deeper into a topic, then I go through the UNC Charlotte library and use Academic Search Complete or other databases. I don't use use Google Scholar for my own research very often.
1 comments:
I miss my grad student days when I could take an afternoon break from other work to peruse new issues in the current periodicals room. Pitt, of course, had a great collection of Latin America-focussed journals. It was really fun to pick up a stack of journals, find a comfy chair, and lose myself in the latest scholarship.
My library in a state system school has cut back drastically on print subscriptions and probably never subscribed to more specialized journals in our field (LARR, HAHR). I depend on journal websites and electronic databases to keep up with with both my research and teaching fields.
Google scholar has also been pretty useful to me. I have set keywords to areas of interest (Bolivia). Yea. I get a lot of reports of new orchid discoveries, etc. but Google scholar also turns up working papers, theses and other reports I might not find otherwise.
I can surf with a laptop and a comfy chair, but it's not the same.
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