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International Students' Guide to the Dalhousie Libraries

Books

An image of a stack of books.Books, sometimes also called texts or monographs, are relatively lengthy works, often on a single topic. They may be print or electronic.


Search for books using the Library catalogue, called Novanet. The Novanet search box can be found on the Libraries' homepage: libraries.dal.ca

Help with Novanet

For help using the Novanet catalogue, there are some online tutorials available. You can also contact me, your liaison librarian, or visit the Service Desk of any Dalhousie library.Image of a question mark bubble.

How to Read a Book's Call Number

What are Journals?

The words journal, serial, and periodical are often used to refer to the same type of resource -- a publication that is issued on a regular schedule, for example every week (like Newsweek), every month (like National Geographic), or every year (like the Annual Review of Anthropology).

Journals can be popular (like People, Psychology Today), or scholarly/academic. Scholarly or academic journals are collections of articles written by professors, researchers, or experts in a given field.

If articles in a journal undergo a review process by other experts in a particular field of study, prior to publication, these articles are known as peer-reviewed.

An image of popular and scholarly journal covers.

 

How to Find Journals at the Dalhousie Libraries

You can find print and electronic journals held at the Dalhousie Libraries, by doing a journal search on the Libraries' homepage, using the search box:

 

The Peer Review Process

Peer-reviewed journal articles go through a checking or verification process before they are published. Other experts in the same field of study as that of the article, examine the article's content to make sure it is valid and correct before the article is published. Articles that have gone through this validation process are known as peer-reviewed articles.

This is a visual image of the peer-review process:

An image of the peer review process.

https://ucsd.libguides.com/CAT3/peerreview

How to Find Peer-Reviewed Journals

Search Google Scholar

Google Scholar


recent articles

 

Set up Google Scholar to Link to Dalhousie E-Resources

Google Scholar is easy to use and searching is familiar since most of us use Google.

You can set up Google Scholar to link to the Dalhousie Libraries' electronic resources so that you have access to fulltext.

  • Go to Google Scholar
  • Click on the Menu (the 3 horizontal lines) in the top left-hand corner : 
  • Select Settings or the gear icon: 
  • Click "Library Links"
  • Search for Dalhousie
  • Check the box beside:

  • Save your selection

Now when you do a search, you will see links like this next to entries, when full text is available: