Articles, journals and databases

How do I find scientific articles? Which databases should I use?

See the databases of your own field on the Resources by subject page. The pages contain field-specific information on information seeking for your particular field of science.

Scientific databases are a fundamental element of information seeking. They are used for searching articles published in scientific journals. In other words, when you search the database, you search the contents of several scientific journals at the same time.

How do I get started?

The databases can be accessed .

You can browse databases by discipline.
You can also search for a specific database by typing its name in JYKDOK's basic search.
When you click on the link to the database in JYKDOK, you can log in with your university credentials and the database will open for your use.

N.B. The university staff can also access databases with the university's VPN, but for students, the university's VPN connection prevents access to databases. If you're on campus and on the university network, there's no need to sign up or use a VPN.

Once in the database, you can try searching. Please note that the search language in international databases is English. Combine keywords into search statements in different ways and see what kind of results you get. Learn how to filter search results and see what information of an article is provided in the database. Feel free to experiment and explore!

Limit search results to peer reviewed articles. Some databases do not have an actual peer review option, but the search results can be limited to articles, which usually does the same thing when it comes to a scientific database.

Depending on the case, the article can be read by clicking on the article name, PDF button, SFX link, Get full text link or something similar. Not all articles are available even with the university user account; tips for such situations in the following paragraphs.

Tips for searching in databases

If you have entered the database through JYKDOK, but the article does not seem to have any option to access it, you can try the following:

Search for the article name .
Search Google for the article name. Sometimes an article or its manuscript version is openly available (self-archived recordings).
add-on on your browser: they will find open versions of articles, if available.
.
: you will get access to articles that would not otherwise open outside the university network.
N.B! ResearchGate and other researchers' social media sites may offer illegally downloaded versions of the article, so avoid them.

Many databases have their own subject vocabulary, such as thesaurus, index terms or subject terms. It's worth exploring them too! You can find new keywords and learn which keywords are used for your topic in each database. Descriptors are database-specific. If necessary, review keywords in section 1 of the Library Tutorial.

For example, the psychology database contains the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. When you open the thesaurus and search for the keyword self-perception, you can find a list of sub-concepts, general concepts and related concepts by clicking on it. Sometimes there is also a short definition of the concept in the glossaries.

Multidisciplinary databases contain journals from different fields of science. These include and .
It often makes sense to limit the search to your own field of science.
Citation databases such as Web of Science and Scopus provide links to other databases. They are prestigious databases that bring together publications from specific disciplines. Citation databases provide various tools for evaluating publications.
Publishers also have several smaller discipline-specific databases. Discipline-specific databases often contain discipline-specific filters. For example, in an educational database, you can limit the search results by grade level.
The figure below shows the key points of database search.

If you are unfamiliar with scientific journals, you should take a moment to browse them. . You can narrow down journals from the Science menu. For example, is ranked at level 3 in the Publication Forum classification, i.e. the highest level journal. In JYKDOK, you can see the different databases in which the journal is included, in this case JSTOR and Wiley. In JSTOR, the magazine is available from 1950 to 1998, and in Wiley from 1999 onwards.

You can also search one journal at a time, but this is usually not practical. Usually, searches are made in the databases in which the journals are included. However, if you want to search for a journal specializing in a specific topic, for example, search for the magazine in JYKDOK and click on the link to the journal’s website. The journal's pages often have Search within this journal and Browse options.

Scientific journals may publish other than just scientific articles. Here, a scientific article refers to a research article or review article. In addition to these, the journal may have separate sections for experiments, shorter reports and more informal observations.

Scientific journals are classified into levels in the Publication Forum. They may also have different impact factors, which are used to compare journals within a certain field of research. The best-known impact factor is calculated on the basis of the Web of Science database, so its usefulness depends on whether research in the field is included in the Web of Science.

Articles published in scientific journals can also be found using AI tools developed for this purpose. Instructions and tips for using these tools can be found on the website: AI tools for finding scientific sources. However, these tools are not a substitute for searching in scientific databases.

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