How to Find Specific Articles

Sometimes a professor will ask you to find a specific article.  They will, hopefully, give you a citation that contains this information:

     Hochwald, Lambeth.  "Little Book, Big Controversy."   Publisher's Weekly, July 29, 1996, p.32.

In this citation, Lambeth Hochwald is the author of the article, whose title is "Little Book, Big Controversy."  The article was published in the journal entitled "Publisher's Weekly," and the date it was published was July 29, 1996.  The article starts on page 32.

The first thing you will need to do is determine if the UNT Libraries subscribes to the journal.  You can do this by checking the Library Catalog, using the Journal Title option from the drop down menu.  You may find that we have the journal in hard, or paper, copies, or the journal may be available electronically, in which case there will be a link to the journal or to the database index which contains it.  In the event that UNT does not subscribe to the journal,  you will need to request the article through InterLibrary Loan, using the form supplied online. 

There are two general databases that have numerous full-text journals available within them.  They are Proquest's Research Library (formerly Periodical Abstracts II) and EbscoHOST's Academic Search Premier.  Let us look at what to do in Proquest.  (You may want to open up another browser window and follow along with these steps.)  From the Library's home page, click on the link for Electronic Resources.  You will see an alphabet.  Click on the letter R, and then, on the page that comes up, scroll down to Research Library and click on that link.

If you are accessing the databases remotely, from home, you will need your EUID and EUID password.  A box will pop up and ask you to enter them.  This should be the only time you have to do this during the session.

To find the article, here is what you must do:

1):  Go to the Advanced search by clicking on the tab of that name.

2)  In the Search box enter the title of the article.  Then, at the drop down box on the right, highlight the line that says "Document title."  In the search box on the next line, type the author's last name, and at the drop down box on the right, highlight the line that says "Author."

It should look like this:

 3)  Next, run the search by clicking on the Search button or pressing the Enter key on your computer.  Here is what you should see:

Clicking on the title of the article will show you the full text.

Let's look for another article, this time using Academic Search Premier, one of the EbscoHOST databases.

        Murray, Janet, and Kinnick, Nile C.  "Contemporary Literacy:  Essential Skills for the 21st Century." Multimedia Schools:  Mar/Apr2003, Vol. 10 Issue 2, p14, 5p

Again, we will enter the title of the article in the search box.

Note  that we only typed a portion of the title.  This shows that you can search on a partial title, as long as it is exact.  Sometimes this is a good strategy to use when typing the entire title doesn't find the article for you--it's possible that there was a mistake in the information you were given.  In this case, it worked well in case there was a question as to whether 21st was in numerals or written out in words. 

Run the search by clicking the search button or pressing the enter key.

Your result should look like this:

Clicking on the title link will show you the citation and full text of the article.  Because it has a link that says "HTML Full Text," it means this article is available in full text through this vendor (EbscoHOST.)  It may also say "PDF Full Text".  If it were not available through this vendor, you could click on the link that says "Check the Univ of North Texas library catalog," and it would search our catalog for the journal.  Then, if the journal is available electronically, a link would appear which you could click.  You would then go to the specified year of the journal and find the article.  If we only have the journal in paper copies, you could go to the appropriate library and find the paper copy of the article.  If the UNT Libraries do not subscribe to the journal, you will need to request the article through Interlibrary Loan.  If you are a distance student and the article is not available electronically, simply use the UNT Distance Learning Request Form to request it.

If somehow you have the wrong title, you can also search on the author's name and look through the resulting list for a title that sounds like the one you have.  Usually it is necessary to enter the name last name first, then the first name, separated by a comma (Frost, Robert).  If your search doesn't find anything using the author's full first name, you may just want to include the first letter of their name.   It is also a good idea to just enter the first part of a title, as we did here, in case we only have the first few words correct, or we are unsure as to whether the title will read "21st" or "twenty-first."

If you find you need help searching or locating an article, please contact a librarian in any of the ways listed on the Ask a Librarian page.