The catalogue lists the print and electronic titles of journals held by the Library, but to find journal articles on your specific topic you need to search the recommended databases for health sciences.
You can find a more comprehensive list of databases for Pharmacy on the Pharmacy LibGuide.
There are several databases that can give you some really good and relevant articles. You should find three databases that suit you and give you the best results, and get to know them.
These are our Top Six Databases for Pharmacy:
Which database do you find easiest to use?
Journals (also called periodicals or serials) are useful for very specific information or very recent information.
Articles in journals are excellent sources of information for assignments. They are often the place where research is first published.
Besides being more up to date than information published in books, they usually concentrate on topical issues or detail particular aspects of a subject.
References to journal articles can come from several sources: they may be mentioned on your subject reading list; or you may have to use a database like those listed on the right to find articles on a specific subject or topic.
One journal may have thousands of articles, and only a few will be on the topic you want. You need a database to find the few articles you will want from amongst the "noise".
Electronic indexes are commonly referred to as databases, electronic databases, or online databases. Some electronic databases can be found on CDs, but most databases you will use can be accessed via the Internet.
They contain records for journal articles from a wide range of journals, and allow you to search throughout all of those records at the same time, using keywords, limits and other tools. This helps you find the relevant journal articles faster than looking through each individual journal.
If there is no full text available you can use the 
button to check if the full text if available in another JCU database or in the library print collection.
Most databases will use the basic boolean terms AND, OR and NOT, but many have their own little tricks and tools to use. Each database is a little bit different and will have slightly different "rules", but they should all have a list of "search tips" sitting somewhere, and we have some guides for certain databases, too.
You should use more than one database, and you should use a mixture of specialty databases. We always recommend that you find three databases you like and play with them so you get comfortable using them.
You should use:
At first year, you can get away with focusing on a database like Scopus, which is a "big" science database with a heavy medical focus. As you continue studying, though, you will want to pick up other databases to use as well.
Remember the question we used for Keywords in Step One and to test Drug Databases?
"Outline the precautions, uses and administrations and adverse effects of arsenic trioxide. Discuss how methods of compounding might influence the absorption of the substance."
This type of question doesn't really need journal articles for an answer. In fact, you probably won't find good information to answer this question in the journals. Books and drug databases give factual information, journal articles give you the research and conclusions.
Try this, though:
"Discuss the possible implications of using arsenic trioxide for treating leukemia in a patient with a known heart condition."
First brainstorm which keywords you should use (e.g. "implications" is not a useful word to search, "heart condition" could be replaced with a variety of other words)
Now click on the link to Scopus on the side of this page and see what kind of information you could find to answer that question. You will need to click on "add search field" to see more fields. Put words that you wish to combine with an "OR" in the same field (e.g. leukemia OR neoplasm*) and words that you wish to combine with "AND" into separate fields.
After you hit "Search", look at the options you are given down the side to limit your search. Would limiting your results to Subject Areas like "Medicine" or "Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics" help you focus on more relevant articles? Can you limit your results to English language articles?
What happens if you add another word, like the name of a drug such as warfarin, in the "search within results" box?
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