Journals

Locating journals

To find printed and electronic versions of a particular journal title, you can search for journals by title by entering that title into the Library catalogue|. If the Library subscribes to both formats, there will be one entry for each version. 

To access the electronic version, hit the 'Click here for full text' link in the catalogue record for the title that has 'Electronic resource' as its sub-title. Alternatively, go to the  Journals| page via the Collections| pages. You can then search for journals alphabetically, by title, by subject or by ISSN. The journals can then be accessed via your LSE username and password.

The printed version will have a classmark on the catalogue record. If the Library does not have the printed journal, check the electronic journals link mentioned above.  All issues of printed journals are at the relevant classmark in the Main Collection.

To run a quick search of the Library catalogue, enter the name of your required journal into the search box below:

Journals not held at LSE

If LSE does not have the printed or electronic version of a journal then you can check to see if other libraries have it using Suncat|, which is a federated catalogue of UK journal holdings, or the Union List of Serials| for journal holdings across London University or  COPAC|  across the UK. 

Use the Interlending and Document Delivery (IDD)| service for journal articles that you cannot easily get yourself by clicking on the "Requests and inter-lending" button on the  Library Catalogue| and select the 'ILL Journal Request (NOT FOR LSE REQUESTS)' option.

Locating journal articles

The Library Catalogue does not have journal articles on it, so you must use a journal article finder to find out what has been published on your topic. If you already know which journal title you are looking for, see the section above.  Do not limit yourself to finding journal articles by using Google or the Electronic  journals page: you will miss a great deal of relevant articles.  Google Scholar| is worth looking at and links through to the Library's electronic journals holdings; however, it is not as comprehensive as the services listed below.

The Library provides a searching service for LSE staff and students called Cross Searcher|  that searches the content of a number of selected databases and resources. This can be used to find journal articles by title, and where available links through to the full text, using the LSE article finder orange button. To run a quick search of Cross Searcher, enter your search terms into the box below:

There are a number of bibliographic databases which index journal articles. These are excellent tools for doing literature searches that will cover all the journal literature in your area of research:

• The ISI Web of Knowledge is an article-finder database that will search journals in the sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities. Each hit will provide other citations to more articles on your topic. Also good for finding book reviews and review articles.
• The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences covers more European journals than the above. Also good for finding book reviews and review articles.
• PAIS International covers articles in public policy, public affairs, international relations, social policy.
• International Political Science Abstracts is produced by the International Political Science Association. It indexes journal articles and book reviews from over 1,000 leading journals covering all aspects of government and politics. Coverage is from 1951 to the present day.
• SCOPUS is the largest abstract and citation database containing both peer-reviewed research literature and quality web sources. With over 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers, Scopus offers researchers a quick, easy and comprehensive resource to support their research needs in the scientific, technical, medical and social sciences fields and also in the arts and humanities.