Lesson 2. Journal Indexes
A journal index is a searchable database of journal articles. It is considered a secondary source of information as it points to the published primary literature. A journal index can include articles from both scholarly journals and magazines and may also include other types of publications such as books, book chapters, government reports, theses and more. An index may be multidisciplinary or it can be limited to a specific discipline such as health, medicine, psychology, engineering, business, etc.
Journal Indexes available at UW Library
The UW Library subscribes to hundreds of different journal indexes, each chosen to support the research and coursework being conducted at the University of Waterloo. Students in the Applied Health Sciences program will find the following journal indexes useful in conducting research.
Premier biomedical journal index: MEDLINE
MEDLINE provides access to over 16 million articles in a variety of biomedical and health topics.
MEDLINE indexes scholarly journals only. It does not index other types of publications such as books, reports, etc. An important feature of the MEDLINE index is the MeSH or Medical Subject Headings controlled vocabulary which should be used to search for medical topics.
MEDLINE can be accessed through several different search platforms, including PubMed, CSA Illumina/ScholarsPortal, Scopus, Google Scholar and more.
Each search platform has different functionalities such as mapping to MeSH headings, cited references, and direct export to Refworks.
Some platforms are freely accessible on the Internet while others may be restricted to UW users.
All these search interfaces access the same MEDLINE articles. Some indexes will also cover additional journals.
Multidisciplinary journal indexes
Scopus points to peer reviewed articles in medicine, health (100% MEDLINE coverage) psychology, sociology, engineering and the physical sciences. Useful features include full references for every article and direct exporting into Refworks.
Web of Science is a collection of indexes to the literature of the arts & humanities, the social sciences, as well as the sciences. It points to peer-reviewed journal articles and includes cited references.
Google Scholar is a freely available search engine that emphasizes scholarly information, particularly in the sciences and technology. Information is drawn from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities.
Other specialized indexes
MEDLINE is the most comprehensive journal index for health and biomedical topics. However, subject specific indexes provide the most comprehensive coverage of a specialized research field such as sport and fitness, sociology or ergonomics. For example, if you are looking for research on drug addiction or sport psychology, PsycINFO, a psychology journal index, may provide better coverage of the research in these fields.
To find out which journal indexes are available on a certain topic, look in the following 2 places on the UW Library website:
1. Health related journal indexes
The Health Studies and Gerontology / Kinesiology subject guide website outlines some of the specialized indexes which are relevant to health and kinesiology research topics.
2. Complete UW Library collection
The Research Databases (Journal articles) webpage compiles all of the journal indexes (and other types of research databases such as ebook collections, newspaper databases, image collections and more), available at the UW Library.