The Service
ingenta provides access to the header material of articles from over 35 publishers. The data is supplied and owned by the respective publishers and covers over 2500 selected journals.
Help and Information
Help is available at any stage. Each screen has a button marked help -
this gives general information about the current screen. On other
parts of the screen, there may be hyperlinks to additional, more
specific, Help information.
Accessing the ingentaJournals Service
Connecting to the service and logging in
To connect to the ingentaJournals service, use the general BIDS URL
(http://www.bids.ac.uk). You may login, by filling in the form with
your allocated username and password and clicking on the LOGIN button
or using the DIRECT button if your institution has registered for i/p
authentication.
Moving from Screen to Screen
Using the standard toolbar
The standard toolbar appears at the left of all of the screens. The
six buttons are:
- Search: Display (or redisplay) a fresh Search Form.
- Subjects: Accesses journals by a list of subjects covered
- Publishers: Displays a list of publishers with content on the service.
- Help: Gives context sensitive aid about the screen or form you are at.
- Contact Us: Provides a form for assistance if you are having difficulty in using the service.
- Exit
The browser can be backed up to earlier copies of a form. For example, the Search form can be redisplayed and modified by adding logical operators. You will also need to use the "Back" facility to return to earlier screens, such as when using Help pages.
General Searching Tips
Move from box to box using the TAB key, filling in details as
appropriate. The more boxes you fill in the more focused the search
becomes. Search expressions can be entered in upper or lower case.
In general, the expression that you enter in any box can be a single term (word or phrase) or several terms connected by one of the following operators:
- ampersand (&) to search for records that contain all of your search terms
- comma (,) to search for records that contain any of the search terms
A word may be truncated using the asterisk as a truncation symbol, eg: AUSTRAL* will find any of AUSTRALIA, AUSTRALIAN, AUSTRALASIA etc.
Within a word, ? can be used as a wild card character representing any 1 character, eg: PRIVATI?ATION will retrieve PRIVATISATION or PRIVATIZATION.
The # character is a "wild word" which can be used to represent any word in a phrase.
Hyphenated terms can be searched for (eg: INTERLEUKIN-6). You can also search for common words (eg: in, to, of, the) and numbers, including decimal points. See below for details of searching for authors and for journal names.
Click the button to perform the search.
Author Names
Names of authors are given in the form SURNAME INITIALS or
SURNAME_INITIALS. Any punctuation such as hyphens, spaces and
apostrophes must be used in your search. You can search on just the
surname or you can specify initials - for best results use truncation
after the first initial. Some examples of author searches are given
below:
MORGAN
MORGAN L*
MORGAN_L*
O'ROURKE
SAN MIGUEL J*
AJCHENBAUM-CYMBALISTA F*
Browsing and Searching for Journals
Click the button on the toolbar to browse through any of the journals
and issues and view tables of contents.
Journal names are given in full. When searching for a journal, you can search either for its full name or for individual words or phrases in the journal name, eg:
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
ASTRONOM*
The year of publication can be specified (eg: 1996), as well as the volume and issue numbers.
Logging off
When you finish the session, it is good practice to logout by clicking on the Exit button. This forces the session to end and prevents someone else using your session.
If you do not logout, the system will time out an inactive session after 15 minutes.