EJournal collections available in the Library's Reading Rooms
We provide access to many collections of electronic journals, including the Library's own journal store, ESTAR. Some collections are archival (JSTOR, PCI) and provide long back runs but not recent issues, while others provide access only to recent years of the journals.
Most of the collections are Library subscribed and, owing to licensing reasons, are only available from British Library workstations within the Library's Reading Rooms, Business & IP Centre and Newsroom. Some collections may be restricted to particular rooms. Some collections are freely available on the World Wide Web.
NB: The Library subscribes to circa 45,000 electronic journals and also receives copies under legal deposit. Use Explore the British Library to search for these by title.
| Journal Collection | Description |
|---|---|
Onsite use only |
|
| 19th Century UK Periodicals | Series 1: New Readerships.
Includes publications on women, children, leisure and sport, and humour. Access to 1.2 million periodical pages, with full runs of titles when possible. Series 2: Empire: Travel and Anthropology, Economics, Missionary and Colonial. Access to over 1 million periodical pages, with complete runs of 91 periodicals documenting Britain’s role as an imperial power throughout the nineteenth century. |
| Bentham Science | Bentham Science is an international STM publisher of pharmaceutical and biomedical research journals. |
| British Periodicals Collection I and II | A collection of circa 470 British journals published between the 1680s and the 1930s. The list of titles is available on the publisher's website. |
| Cairn Collection | A collection of high quality, full text peer reviewed academic journals from France and Belgium. Includes journals in the fields of history, literature and linguistics, psychology, sociology, political science, education, law and economics. Text and search interface in French. |
| Cambridge Journals Online | Over 220 peer-reviewed academic journals containing the latest research from a broad sweep of subject areas. |
| CAOD | China/Asia On Demand (CAOD)/Asia Document Delivery is a powerful Web-based research, access and electronic information solution.
Provides access to a wide range of journals (9,638 titles), millions of theses and dissertations,
patents and conference proceeding papers. Articles can be retrieved and downloaded in their
original format including graphs and illustrations.
NB: Depending on the article you require there are two methods of accessing the full text. Having clicked on the Full text link, click the 'Confirm to continue' button, click 'OK in the Microsoft dialog box and then select the Full text link presented. If that fails, choose the 'Click here to enter your mail address' option (just above the 'Confirm' button), enter your email address, click the 'Confirm' button, click 'OK in the dialog box and then make a note of the transaction number displayed. Revisit the site later and enter the transaction number into the Order Options Track box on the left-hand side of the screen; then select the Full text link presented. Note that it may take up to 3 hours before the article is available online. |
| Eastview | Online databases of Russian/FSU Publications (East View). Files: Central Newspapers, Regional Newspapers, CIS & Baltic Periodicals, Social Sciences & Humanities, Parliamentary Publications, Military & Security Periodicals, 2010 Presidential Election in Belarus, Izvestiia Digital Archive, Pravda Digital Archive. |
| Eighteenth Century Journals | Seamless integrated access to Sections I-IV of the digital Eighteenth Century Journals project . This Portal brings together rare journals printed between c1685 and 1815, illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. |
| EMERALD | Online access to mainly management and library and information sciences journals, published by MCB University Press. The database contains articles from its archive, back as far as 1989. |
| ESTAR | The British Library's own system, providing integrated access to the full text of over 4000 major journals from a number of publishers. Coverage is mainly in the fields of science, technology and medicine but also includes some humanities journals. |
| Future Medicine | Future Medicine journals are positioned at the forefront of modern medicine and are published according to industry-leading standards or peer review, presentation, speed of publication, online functionality and author service. |
| HeinOnline Law Journals | Contains more than 1,200 law and law-related periodicals in full text. Coverage is from the first issue published for all periodicals and goes up to the most current issue allowed based on contracts with publishers. Therefore, in some cases the current issues are available, but generally a user will notice a one-volume delay. Searching can be done by title or author name; full-text searching of the collection or select periodicals is also available, and date ranges may be entered to narrow the search results. |
| IEEE Xplore | A collection of journals, conference proceedings and technical standards published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and also the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). |
| Informahealthcare | Online access to more than 100 journals in the fields of allied health, healthcare, pharmaceutical science and clinical medicine. Now includes the Expert Review journals that provide information on the most exciting emerging trends in healthcare, best clinical practice and key advances in the major therapeutic areas. |
| IOS Press | IOS Press publishes international journals, ranging from computer science and mathematics to medicine and the natural sciences. |
| JSTOR | Digitised backfiles of core scholarly journals, in the Arts, Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences. For each journal there is a fixed period of time ranging, in most cases, from 2 to 5 years, that defines the gap between the most recently published issue and the date of the most recent issues available in JSTOR. |
| Karger | Online journals from Karger, mainly covering science, technology and medicine. |
| Liebert Online | Online journals published by Mary Ann Liebert, mainly covering science, technology and medicine. |
| Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins (LWW) | A collection of more than 200 e-journals covering medicine, nursing and allied health published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins (LWW). Access to LWW e-journals is via the Journals@Ovid database. To browse a full list of titles, log into the OvidSP site and click on the ‘Journals' link in the blue bar at the top of the page. |
| Literature Online |
Full-text of (mainly U.S.) journals on English and American literature and related subjects. Coverage varies, but in many cases goes back several years. |
| Nature Publishing Group | Nature Publishing Group publishes journals and online databases across the life, physical and applied sciences and, most recently, clinical medicine. Content encompasses daily news from award-winning journalists, expert opinion and practical methodology, and more high impact research and reviews than any science publisher. Over 30 journals are published in association with prestigious academic societies. |
| Oxford Journals Online | Online journals from Oxford University Press. |
| Periodicals Archive Online (formerly PCI Full Text) | An archive of hundreds of digitised scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. Searching within the full text of articles is possible. |
| Project Muse | Online access to the full text of selected scholarly journals mainly in the arts and humanities, but also social sciences and mathematics. Coverage for selected titles now begins with volumes as early as 1993. |
| RSC Journals | Full text chemistry journals covering traditional disciplines (analytical, organic and inorganic chemistry) plus new developments and cross-disciplinary topics. |
| Sabinet | Sabinet is a collection of over one hundred South African journals, covering the social sciences, arts and humanities, and law. Full text is provided for most entries. |
| ScienceDirect | Web database that contains the full text of Elsevier journals mainly in the fields of science and technology but also some titles in other disciplines such as social science and arts and humanities. NB: The Library does not subscribe to all of the material in ScienceDirect in full text, though it is possible to view abstracts of content we do not subscribe to. |
| SpringerLink | SpringerLink is the premier electronic data source from Springer for researchers in biomedicine, life science, clinical medicine, physics, engineering, mathematics, computer science, humanities, economics and much more. NEW: Access to over 300 books from Springer's Behavioural Science e-Books collection. We also have access to over 2,000 scientific e-books from Springer’s Biomedical and Life Sciences and Earth and Environmental Sciences collections via SpringerLink. Covers all English language e-Books, e-Book series and e-Reference works published between 2005-present. |
| Taylor & Francis Online | Taylor & Francis online brings together full text journal content from Taylor & Francis, Routledge and Psychology Press. Titles cover a wide variety of subjects across science and technology, humanities and social science. |
| Walter de Gruyter | Access to nearly 100 fully peer-reviewed journals covering humanities, medicine, the sciences and law. Although some journals have German titles they also include contributions in English, or other languages. |
| Wiley InterScience | Over 1400 online journals from Wiley covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities. |
| African Journal Archive | This is a retrospective digitisation project of full-text journal articles published in Africa, in the Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, currently comprising 41 titles. |
| Archive of African Journals | Digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals courtesy of the African E-Journals Project. |
| BioMed Central | The research articles in all journals published by BioMed Central are available online without charge. |
| Directory of Open Access Journals | Free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals, covering all subjects and languages. |
| Europe PubMed Central | Europe PubMed Central provides a free-to-access online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed publications from biomedical and life sciences research. Europe PubMed Central additionally provides access to PubMed abstracts, biological and medical patent records, searchable grant data provided by the funders of the service, as well as link-out to gene, protein and chemical compound databases. |
| Free electronic journals | A selective list of directories of free electronic journals is provided under Periodicals: A Guide to resources |
| Free Medical Journals Online | Promotes access to medical journals on the Internet. Most titles are free, some free 6 months after publication or some after a year. |
| Free Online Chemistry Journals | Provides access to chemistry journals on the Internet, freely available, or free for a range of years. |
| HighWire Press Journal Titles | The Internet imprint of Stanford University Libraries. Provides access to contents lists, abstracts or full text of titles in the fields of biological, medical, physical and social sciences. |
| Internet Library of Early Journals | A joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford. The core collection for the project are runs of at least 20 consecutive years of a number of key early British journals. |
| Japan Science and Information Aggregator | The "Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic" (J-STAGE) system supports science and technology information-related electronic journal release in Japan. Research papers released on J-STAGE are linked to papers on various worldwide electronic journal sites via ChemPort, PubMed, and CrossRef. |
| The Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (ncse) | The Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) is a free, online edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers. ncse includes full runs of the first five titles, and a decade only of the Publishers' Circular. Titles are represented as completely as possible, including multiple editions, advertisements, wrappers, and supplements where these could be found. Titles are: Monthly Repository (1806-1837) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Northern Star (1838-1852), Leader (1850-1860), English Woman's Journal (1858-1864), Tomahawk (1867-1870), and Publishers' Circular (1880-1890). All six journals are segmented to article level, and can be downloaded freely. |
| Persee: le portail de revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales | A portal to entire back runs of French language social and human sciences journals. Subject areas covered include anthropology, law, politics, history, sociology and geography. Includes the full text of the Revue française de science politique from 1951 to 5 years behind the current date. Free access is guaranteed to back issues only. New articles are added annually but most titles remain 3-5 years behind the current date. All articles are in French. |
| PubMed Central | The US national Library of Medicine's free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. |
| Revues.org | Freely accessible collection of French language journals in the humanities and social sciences, with a strong focus on history and area studies. |
| Royal Society Archive | The Royal Society's historical journal archive has around 60,000 historical scientific papers accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available. |
| SciELO Social Sciences English | Site contains the principal social science journals of Latin America translated into English. |