Occupational Therapy: Journals

Journals are scholarly publications that contain articles written by researchers, professors and other experts in the field. Journals focus on a specific discipline or field of study. Unlike newspapers and magazines, journals are intended for an academic or technical audience, not general readers.

Most journal articles:

• Are peer reviewed
• Contain original research
• Focus on current developments
• Cite other works and have reference lists

Journals are published on a regular basis (monthly, quarterly, etc.) and are sequentially numbered.

Each copy is an issue; a set of issues makes a volume (usually each year is a separate volume). When you see a reference that looks something like this: 

Author, A. and Author, B. (Year) 'The title of an article', The Title of a Journal of a Specific Subject, 54(2), pp. 123-134

The numbers at the end are telling you what the volume (in the case above, Volume 5) and issue (in the case above, issue 2) numbers are. The pp. stands for 'pages', because many journals still exist in print and you're probably looking at a digital version of it.

Accessing journal articles

• If you are on campus or connected via remote access, clicking on an article link should take you to the full text without you needing to log in any further (if we subscribe to that particular journal). 
• If you are not on campus and aren't using remote access, you'll probably need to log in to the journal platform. To do this, look for an option to login via Shibboleth/OpenAthens or via your institution. Then you need to use your QMU login details to let the journal platform know that because you're a QMU student, you should be able to view the full text of the article.

More information on accessing our electronic journals is available here.

Do you want to search for journal articles by subject or keyword?  Use the resources listed on the 'databases' page (click on the databases tab).