Search Primo:
Journals, sometimes called periodicals or serials, are scholarly magazines with each issue comprising several journal articles written by different authors. Journals are subject specific with an expert editorial board of academics reviewing each article is submitted for publication.
Primo can search across the hundreds of journal that the Library subscribes to. You may prefer to search these subject specific journal publisher collections instead of Primo for a more focused search. However, remember the Library may not have purchased every journal from these publisher so not all hits will be full text. Always check Primo to determine the library's holdings of a journal.
Library Skills Guide: peer review and journal tutorials
Subject databases are tools which index journals from many of the different journal publishers tools e.g. Science Direct (Elsevier), SAGE and many others not listed above, but only select relevant subject focused journals from those publishers for inclusion in their database. This offers a focused way to search across different publisher platforms for Engineering topics related to industry/business topics or environmental/sustainability topics.
Search tip:
Your search terms will only be matched to words found in the title or abstract of the article - databases differ to Primo and the publisher platforms as they do not match your search terms to the full text. This should provide you with a more focused search. Access to the full text is usually provided by the Ebsco databases or, if not, you will be offered an option to check Primo for full text access.
Scopus and Web of Science are competitor product databases which search across selected journals from many different publishers and provide advanced features for analysing results to see trends in the literature. They can be useful for identifying review papers, highly cited papers and for searching by author. They are most useful at final project stage and for Masters and Post Graduate Researchers. You could use both or choose one which you prefer - the journal coverage is slightly different so see which one is a best fit for your project although many of the same journals are indexed by both tools.