Academic Journals

Subscriptions to academic journals are frequently held by your institutional library or your company although you can usually subscribe individally too. Academic journals are an important means of keeping up to date with the latest research in a specific area. They are:

  • a collection of articles written by experts and usually peer reviewed
  • published periodically in print and/or online
  • up to date, containing the most recent research on a topic
  • usually available on subscription, but some are available free under the “author pays” model

Because academic journals contain peer reviewed articles they are deemed to be reliable sources of information.

Staying up to date with the key research in your area and identifying the right journals or articles can be a daunting task. Your library website is a good place to start. Alternatively, using the developing resource Google Scholar will point you in the direction of scholarly material. Scirus is another useful specialist scientific search engine. Try Chemedia for food science and technology from Spain and Latin America.

Click here for a diagram depicting some of the most common routes to finding academic journals on the web.

Members of a learned societies may have access to a journal available at membership rates. Many journals also offer a free “Table of Contents” alerting service so you can stay up to date with the research published by each one.

The following list of popular journal websites may be worth a look:

  • Ingenta (collection of academic and professional publications from other publishers)
  • MetaPress (world’s largest scholarly content host)
  • Wiley Interscience (provides full-text access to Wiley journals, reference works, books and databases)
  • ScienceDirect (provides world’s largest electronic full-text and database collection of science, technology and medicine)
  • Espacenet (FREE access to patents)
  • Elsevier food science journals (Click on  journals  in the left hand menu)

Access to journal articles is usually via a paid subscription, but some journals do offer free articles, sample copies or free trials. Some academic journals adopt an “Author Pays” model where articles are free to the reader. The Directory of Open Access Journals has a list of these.

This model is becoming increasingly popular and so you may want to look at the following too: