Journals (also known as periodicals, serials or magazines) are published on a regular basis, for example, daily (newspapers), weekly, monthly, quarterly or perhaps annually. As journal articles can be produced more quickly than the time it takes to publish an entire book, they are more up-to-date than books. Journal articles enable you to keep abreast of current issues and trends in your subject area.
The Library provides access to print and electronic journals.Note that printed journals cannot be borrowed from the library though you may photocopy articles for personal research purposes (within current copyright regulations).
If the Library holds a journal in print format, the complete year's issues may subsequently be bound together within hardback covers. If not, the loose issues will be stored (in issue number order) in a pamphlet box on the Journals shelves. 
If you want to quickly find journal articles on a topic for an essay or assignment, one of the best places to start is USearch. This Discovery Tool searches many of the individual library databases and electronic journals.
A journal reference gives all the information needed to be able to locate a specific article in a journal or database.
This is a typical journal reference (Harvard style)
By: Strogner, M. 2009, The Media Enhanced Museum Experience. Curator, Vol. 52 (4), pp. 385-397
This article was written by Margaret Strogner (author).
It is about museums and media.
You can find it in the 2009 year of Curator (the journal title).
The volume is 52, the issue number is 4 and the article begins at page 385.
If you have a journal reference, you need to find out if the library holds that journal. The simplest way is to search the Electronic Journals by journal title. If we have the journal, a link will be provided to the Database which contains it.
If it's not available online, it may be available in print format on the Journals shelves - search the Library Catalogue by journal title.
Failing that, you can use the online Document Delivery service to request a copy of the article. A PDF copy of the article will be sent by the British Library within a matter of days for downloading purposes to your email address.
If we don't have the journal electronically, we may have it in print form on the Journals shelves - search the Library Catalogue for the Journal title.
Failing that, you can use the online Document Delivery service to request a copy of the article. A PDF copy of the article will be sent by the British Library within a matter of days for downloading purposes to your email address.
We recommend Google Scholar if you want to use a search engine to find journal articles or other high quality information. Scholar limits results to academic-related sources, such as peer reviewed journals, research based working papers or other scholarly resources. Take the steps below to link to full text sources held at Ulster and export any references to the Refworks database
Top tip: login to the Portal first - that will help with full text access off campus.
For more information about Google Scholar, including selection and ranking of results, citation metrics and search tips see: http://scholar.google.co.uk/intl/en/scholar/about.html
If you intend to use the 'normal' Google, check Settings for advanced search tips to improve the accuracy of your search. Northampton University also has a useful video - Ten Tips for Google Searching.