Ebooks (electronic books) are online versions of print books you would find in libraries. QMU pays for thousands of ebooks for you to use. These include textbooks, dictionaries and encyclopedias.
To find ebooks:
Each issue of a journal contains a number of articles. These are usually written by people who research or work in the field that journal focuses on.
Below are some of the articles listed in volume 60, issue 1 of Business and Society:
'Natural sciences, management theory, and system transformation for sustainability' by David Wasieleski, Sandra Waddock, Tim Fort, and Nuno Guimarães-Costa, pp. 7-25
‘Institutional-political scenarios for anthropocene society’ by Andrew J. Hoffman and P. Devereaux Jennings, pp. 57-94
‘Do sustainability rating schemes capture climate goals?’ by Saphira A. C. Rekker and Jacquelyn E. Humphrey, pp. 125-160
Below is a full reference to one of those articles in the Cite Them Right Harvard style (the referencing style required for your programme):
Rekker, S.A. and Humphrey, J.E. (2021) 'Do sustainability rating schemes capture climate goals?', Business & Society, 60(1), pp.125-160. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650319825764 (Accessed: 20 July 2022)
These are the different components of the journal article reference above and the order they should be presented:
If accessed online:
If you are asked to find a specific journal article the easiest way is to copy and paste the article title into the search box on the LRC homepage: https://www.qmu.ac.uk/library
If you don't find the article this way, you can use Discover (the library's search tool) to search for the journal it is published in. Alternatively you can search for it in the ejournals A-Z. You can then either search for the article title within the journal, or navigate to the year, volume, issue and page number. Remember you will need all this information to reference your article in your assignment.
We purchase our journals as part of a collection or database. This is useful because:
Business & Society can be found in the SAGE Journals Premier 2020 collection. Other journals, such as Business Excellence, can be found in the database ProQuest Central. You can find out about databases from the section on databases below.
During your studies, you will need to do some independent research. Alongside academic books, textbooks and encyclopaedias, one of the most common types of resource that you will come across and use is the Academic Journal.
Described as being like ‘academic magazines’, journals contain articles which cover a particular area of study, and are published regularly throughout the year – and the OU library subscribes to over 150,000 of them.
Journal articles tend to provide an in-depth look at research in a specific area, and don’t normally provide a topic overviews, or subject introductions. You will be best looking in an ebook if you are looking for an introductory information.
Ejournals are journals that are published online. The articles which are published within journals are written by subject experts, and many undergo a rigorous quality check called peer review. This means journal articles are:
In your studies you may be asked to find and read journal articles or be told that a journal is core to your studies
Where to find ejournals
Most journals can be found using Library Search to search for the journal name.
You can search Library Search for a specific journal or find journals covering particular topics.
Key journal titles for your subject area are also listed in the selected resources in QMU Library Guides. These pages are particularly helpful if your module requires you to do independent research.
Advantages of ejournal databases
The ejournals we subscribe to are made available through many different databases.
Using an ejournal database allows you to:
Search across thousands of articles from many journals at the same time
Search for articles on a specific subject or topic
Access to the full text
QMU subscribes to over 100 journal databases. It’s worth noting that one journal can appear in multiple different databases. Some databases will provide you with the most recent issue of a journal, others may give access to older issues.
Try it for yourself
If you already know a journal in your subject area, try accessing it through Discover.
Alternatively go to selected resources for your study and choose a subject that interests you. Use the ejournals filter to see a list of journals on that topic. Choose one and have a look at the back issues (previous issues of the journal).
Databases are organised sets of publications that can be multidisciplinary in focus or be focused on particular subject areas. They:
We recommend you use a subject database that focuses on your area because it will provide you with higher quality articles than you may find on Google or Google Scholar. They also have more powerful search capabilities.
Your librarian has produced a guide to recommended databases and other resources in a subject guide. You can find a full list of subject guides here: https://libguides.qmu.ac.uk. You can also find a list of the databases QMU has access to on the Databases A-Z.
To access journal articles and ebooks through QMU library, you need your QMU username and password.
You need to log in either through each website's 'institutional login' option with your QMU username and password. Select 'Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh' from dropdown lists. You may need to enter 'UK Access Management Federation' first to access a secondary list.
You are always looking to get to a page that asks you to log in with your QMU username and password. The route to this will be different depending on which of the many platforms or sites you are using, but the login page usually looks like this image below. You will need to login individually for each different website.
Alternatively you can use the Horizon remote access service. This tells websites that you are a QMU student and you will not have to log in separately to each website each time. This can be faster and easier than logging in individually to each website. See the QMU IT Services page to find out more about remote access: https://www.qmu.ac.uk/study-here/learning-facilities/it-services/remote-access/
Please contact Assist@qmu.ac.uk
Referencing is how you acknowledge the work of other people in your assignments. To learn about why referencing is important how to do it, complete this Cite Them Right tutorial: https://www.citethemrightonline.com/tutorial
For guidance on how to cite different kinds of sources in your work, use the Cite Them Right website: https://www.citethemrightonline.com/
For information about referencing at QMU and advice on how to write well and include references in your work, see the QMU Guide to Referencing: https://libguides.qmu.ac.uk/referencing
In Health subjects, you may be asked to do a critical appraisal of academic sources on a particular topic. You may also be asked to conduct a systematic review or be asked to systematically search the literature on a topic.
Please see our guide to critical appraisal: https://libguides.qmu.ac.uk/critical-appraisal
And our guide to systematic reviews: https://libguides.qmu.ac.uk/systematic-reviews