What is a journal?
Hi this is. Chris from the academic skills team here at the library so what is a journal. A journal could refer to a number of different kinds of documents on the one hand it could refer to a magazine which is a kind of a glossy a document that you might be familiar with. Its orient to the general public or or a specific segment of the general public or could refer to a trade journal which is a document that's oriented to people from a particular particular occupation or or trade but in more often than not in the academic context is referring to a scholarly or academic journal and what all three of these types of documents have in common is that they're all periodicals and that means that they are coming over or an issue of that of that journal comes out at regular intervals and that could be every week every month it could be quarterly. That's that's every three months or yearly now scholarly journals tend to be a fairly fairly slow coming so you can expect them to come out and perhaps quarterly or every couple of months or something like that so how you tell the difference between a journal and in a book for instance after all they look they can look quite similar so. I've got one of each type in front of me here and it's actually the the purple one right there that is the that is the journal and the tell-tale signs are right here where it will say a volume and a number so that indicates to you that it is a periodical. That's coming out. Maybe this one comes out three times a year the volume will generally refer to the output of this journal over the course of a single year. So if it has if you see that it's got a volume number and and and an issue number or here it's the issue is called number. Then you can be. You can be sure that you're looking at a periodical and thus they're probably looking at a journal so this is what these look like in the in the print environment. Let's go have a look at have a look at what they look like in the online environment. So let's have a look at what a journal looks like in the online environment so.
I'm just gonna do a really simple search in our Library Catalog for the term astrobiology and we can see in our list of results that telling a journal from another type of document whether it's a book or anything else. It's pretty simple in the catalog. We actually have these nice icons sort of over leftish over here and so this one here is for a journal just says journal so we know that that is a journal and down. Here we've got a book that's icon. That says book that's fine. Let's look a little bit more in-depth by actually going into one of these journals so I'm gonna click online resource then open source in a new window and then click the red circle. Go to get to the journal itself and this is gonna open up and what. I'm gonna see right off. The bat is if we have a look at the left-hand side over here we've got this nice cover. So this is the the cover of the current issue of this particular journal so if we were still getting this journal in print which. I don't think we are. This would be the the cover of it and does it look. Doesn't it look nice if we want to have a look at all of the issues that are available for this journal. I go up to all issues and click the link and we can see an illustration of what it is that we were talking about earlier in terms of journal being a periodical and coming out one issue at a time over regular intervals so we can see here that in the case of this journal volume 16 is referring to all the output of this journal for the year 2017. We can see that there were four issues that came out over the course of 2017 so in other words this is a quarterly coming out every every three months or so or four times per year so we have the first issue of 2017 coming out in January of 2017 and then another in April another in July and other in October if I click on the link for this issue it will open up and I will see that any issue is made up of a number of journal articles.
I'm going to talk about what a journal article is in a little bit more depth than a different video so for now that's all that's that's a little video on what a journal is if you have any questions you can get them and I in touch with us at library at and you like always I eat or do you drop by one of our training sessions where we cover topics relating to books and journals and all kinds of other things having to do with the library and information. Thanks very much talk to you again.
I'm just gonna do a really simple search in our Library Catalog for the term astrobiology and we can see in our list of results that telling a journal from another type of document whether it's a book or anything else. It's pretty simple in the catalog. We actually have these nice icons sort of over leftish over here and so this one here is for a journal just says journal so we know that that is a journal and down. Here we've got a book that's icon. That says book that's fine. Let's look a little bit more in-depth by actually going into one of these journals so I'm gonna click online resource then open source in a new window and then click the red circle. Go to get to the journal itself and this is gonna open up and what. I'm gonna see right off. The bat is if we have a look at the left-hand side over here we've got this nice cover. So this is the the cover of the current issue of this particular journal so if we were still getting this journal in print which. I don't think we are. This would be the the cover of it and does it look. Doesn't it look nice if we want to have a look at all of the issues that are available for this journal. I go up to all issues and click the link and we can see an illustration of what it is that we were talking about earlier in terms of journal being a periodical and coming out one issue at a time over regular intervals so we can see here that in the case of this journal volume 16 is referring to all the output of this journal for the year 2017. We can see that there were four issues that came out over the course of 2017 so in other words this is a quarterly coming out every every three months or so or four times per year so we have the first issue of 2017 coming out in January of 2017 and then another in April another in July and other in October if I click on the link for this issue it will open up and I will see that any issue is made up of a number of journal articles.
I'm going to talk about what a journal article is in a little bit more depth than a different video so for now that's all that's that's a little video on what a journal is if you have any questions you can get them and I in touch with us at library at and you like always I eat or do you drop by one of our training sessions where we cover topics relating to books and journals and all kinds of other things having to do with the library and information. Thanks very much talk to you again.