Library Services
Journals are also referred to as Periodicals or Pers. Recent print volumes of Librarianship Pers and Archive Pers are arranged alphabetically next to the book collections on the 1st floor of the Science Library (DMS Watson building). The pre-2000 volumes of most print journals are held outside of the library and need to be ordered in advance using our Stores service.
The library catalogue (called Explore) is the principal tool to find books, journals and other materials (either in print or in electronic format) held in UCL libraries. If you know the title of the article you need, you can enter it directly in the Explore search box. If UCL Libraries have an electronic subscription to the journal in which the article is published, this will appear in your results list and you can download the full-text following the instructions provided. The same applies if you're looking for a journal article using one of the many article-specific UCL Databases.
If you're using one of our databases to find journal articles, you might not be able to read the article within the database itself. If you see the Findit@UCL icon, click on it to link to the full-text
Sometimes you will see a link to the publisher's site. Unless the article is open access, you might find that you can't reach the full-text.
Clicking on the Findit@UCL link instead will link you to the full-text via UCL's subscription access, if available.
If you're using Google Scholar you can set up the Library Links feature so that it will display a findit@UCL link to help show you which articles are available via UCL subscriptions.
Check out our Explore guide to find out more about how to use Explore for your research.
UCL subscribes to Browzine, a resource that allows you to organise UCL's academic journals in a browsable format, displayed on virtual bookshelves. Browzine is a great tool to help stay up to date with new content, and bookmark articles that you want to read in the future.