Introduction

The George Mason University Libraries, like other academic libraries, offer many new electronic resources that open up entirely novel possibilities for teaching and research. Among these are electronic journals, which are rapidly becoming a "growth industry" among publishers. The proliferation of these publications has focused much attention on the possibility of realizing the true "scholar's workstation": the computer that delivers to the user's desktop not just bibliographic information about articles, but the articles themselves.

Advances in technology have made this very attractive possibility at least a partial reality: some journals are now available electronically with graphics, charts, tables and other crucial information at very high-quality resolution for on-screen viewing and printing. Students should understand, however, that most journals are still published in print and that electronic journals, while increasingly important, should be considered as just one part of the total pool of resources available to them.

The proliferation of electronic journals adds many layers of complexity to any framework for understanding their place within the teaching and learning process. Publishers and distributors of these publications present them in widely varying ways, creating a need for the researcher to grasp what they include, what groupings of journals are available, what time spans are covered by different sets of journals offered by various vendors, and the extent of the range of disciplines represented by this growing set of resources.

For example, the well-known JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/) project, an electronic journal collection of backfiles of mainly social science journals, does not have current publications at all but is invaluable for research in social issues in earlier decades, even back to the nineteenth century. In contrast, the Academic Press collection known as IDEAL (http://www.apnet.com/www/ap/aboutid.htm) has many very recent publications in the sciences and some social sciences. This one very basic example of differences in electronic journal collections (the retrospective versus contemporary time coverage and the varying disciplinary coverage) highlights the subtleties students should understand in order to make informed choices about use of these resources.

A Range of Possibilities

From the teaching and learning perspective, electronic journals pose some intriguing questions. The enormous advantages of convenient access and quick printing they offer allows students to accelerate their research process, advantages that should not be minimized. Electronic journals should be understood, however, as one of a range of possibilities for information, especially for the novice or the undergraduate.

The tendency to develop a truncated view of research is possible, of course, with any set of visible and well-known resources: undergraduates may return to the same familiar print resources repeatedly. The time-honored example of this habit with print indices, in all academic libraries, is many undergraduates' over-reliance on the "green books," the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, as the one best access resource to periodicals. But with indices moving online and become databases, the students' tendency to use only the electronic environment is ever more striking.

The wish among the uninitiated to use only electronic journals is only a logical conclusion of this behavioral trend. The pedagogical issues raised by the advent of electronic journals can best be understood, then, as depending on the level of knowledge and subject expertise of the student. From the freshman who has no grasp of what a "journal" is, in whatever format, to the doctoral student who needs the latest, cutting-edge research in a given field, the range of expertise in the accessing and evaluating of journals varies enormously.

Faculty members who gain some sense of their students' research sophistication at the beginning of each semester will be able to guide them, with the assistance of librarians, through the mazes of the research process and will be able to promote the use of electronic journals at the appropriate point in that process.

Undergraduates' Use of Electronic Journals

For undergraduates, the specific points surrounding electronic journals are:

Understanding the concept of a journal and its related concept of peer review
Most undergraduates do not know these basic concepts. Explaining these ideas in class at the time an assignment is given may clarify some misconceptions. But requiring students to see and handle some print journals initially will elaborate on the basic idea and may help them to grasp more completely what electronic journals are when they start using them from the Libraries' Web page.

Distinguishing electronic journals from other web-based information
The seamlessness of the web environment, with no quality control and filtering at a global level, creates a rich but very uncertain, messy information world. Undergraduates often do not yet have the knowledge or background to differentiate electronic journals, with their quality control through peer review, from many web sites that appear authoritative but are suspect, produced by special interest groups or others with agendas. The web category of "e-zines" adds to this complexity because these may appear to be journals but are popular press publications.

Finding electronic journals within the range of undergraduates' knowledge and understanding Electronic journals, like their print counterparts, contain highly technical vocabulary describing advanced research projects and processes. Students in introductory courses may have difficulty with these resources, but students in subject majors may have learned enough to make better use of them. Increasingly, some databases intended for interdisciplinary undergraduate use such as Expanded Academic Index contain links to full-text articles, but this practice is done selectively and students will need guidance in selecting the best and most appropriate journal articles, electronic or in print.

Fitting electronic journals into the larger research process
The studies conducted by Carol Kuhlthau (1993) of Rutgers University show that novice researchers generally move through several stages after receiving an assignment. The initial stages are much concerned with finding a focus and working through confusion about purpose and scope of the project (stages which are common, in fact, with more advanced researchers). Preliminary browsing in carefully selected information resources to elaborate upon initial ideas is one method of moving the process forward.

In the early stages of a project, undergraduates can be guided in browsing and scanning of carefully selected information resources, including electronic journals. The faculty member's guidance at this step is critical so that students develop a focus that advances the process. Using electronic journals later after students understand something of the larger pool of resources available to them, allows students to develop a better sense of how they might be useful, as well as their limitations for a specific assignment.

Understanding the total range of potentially useful information resources is a large issue for both undergraduates and graduates, but undergraduates and other beginning researchers need most acutely the basic outlines of that information landscape. Electronic journals, because of their sheer convenience, may override informed choices elsewhere from the larger set of resources. Faculty and librarians working together can develop some sense of that larger landscape for undergraduates so that convenience is not the sole criterion for selecting information resources.

Graduate Students' Use of Electronic Journals

For graduate students and others, electronic journals offer rich possibilities for expanding their research. Because graduate students work within a disciplinary knowledge base, some journal titles in their disciplines are already familiar to them and others are assimilated very quickly, just as graduate students learn the landmark works and best-known schools of thought in their fields. The pedagogical and research issues for graduate students can best be thought of as ways to enhance and enrich their research options. Some of these issues are:

Keeping up-to-date with new research
As researchers, graduate students need to become aware of current research very quickly, particularly in science and technology fields. Although the most current research is usually thought of as circulating in the "invisible college" first, electronic journals make research articles available relatively quickly and graduate students need to know which groups of electronic journals will be most productive for them. Many publishers such as Academic Press (for the IDEAL set of journals) make tables-of-contents for electronic journals available online so that quick scanning of the latest journal issues is possible.

The same IDEAL service allows users to set up an "ALERT" (http://www.idealibrary.com/news/ideal-alert.jsp) service. This entails setting up a profile so that the user receives by e-mail tables of contents from specific journal titles or a a digest of article titles from more than one journal. Other vendors and publishers such as the Institute of Physics (http://www.ioppublishing.com/) show "forthcoming article" citations, another way of becoming very aware of current research topics and seeing new trends in research.

Facilitating interdisciplinary connections
Although graduate students necessarily specialize, much advanced research and thinking now seeks out and draws upon research in related fields. The sheer ease with which tables of contents in electronic journals can be browsed allows graduate students to see interdisciplinary connections. Also, some vendors such as Project Muse (http://www.press.jhu.edu/muse.html) (Johns Hopkins University Press e-journals) allow searching by keyword across a range of journals. In the case of Project Muse, its humanities journals encompass such disciplines as history, literature, art history, semiotics, cultural theory, and linguistics. The ability to conduct searches quickly across a variety of journals facilitates interdisciplinary thinking and increases the visibility of topics and ideas that might not otherwise "surface."

For graduate students, electronic journals can therefore become vehicles for sharpening awareness of new research and deepening understanding of one's own discipline within the context of other disciplines.

Electronic Journals: Increasing Their Visibility

At George Mason University, the Libraries subscribe to or have access to hundreds of electronic journals. Many of these come in groupings or "aggregates" selected by publishers or vendors. The Libraries have identified these journals as especially useful for the research programs and teaching emphases of the university, as with other information resources. The major distinction about electronic journals, however, is that they are often "invisible" because they are not physically represented on the Libraries' shelves but must be made visible through electronic means so that users know they exist.

The major vendors and publishers of electronic journals that the Libraries have arrangements with directly or through the VIVA consortium are:

JSTOR - backfiles of mainly social science journals, available in PDF, requiring Adobe Acrobat software on user's computer. High-quality resolution of graphics and illustrations as well as print through digitizing process. Developed mainly as an experiment to solve storage problems of large backfiles of print journals in research libraries, the program now offers 117 titles and brings coverage up to within 2-5 years of the current year.

IDEAL - Academic Press journals, mainly in the science and technology fields but some social science journals represented as well. Offers a tables-of-contents "alert service." Over 250 publications represented.

Project Muse - university press journals, mainly in humanities fields, of Johns Hopkins University. Contains over 60 publications.

Journals@Ovid Fulltext - electronic journals arranged in subject categories as well as alphabetically by title. Categories include: clinical medicine, behavioral and social sciences, life sciences, nursing, and physical science and engineering.

Institute of Physics (IOP) - a small set of journals in specialized physics subdisciplines such as nonlinearity, nuclear and particle physics, and neural systems. Offers a "forthcoming articles" feature.

ACS Publications/American Chemical Society - research journals in chemistry and chemical engineering. Offers the ASAP Alerts service delivers announcements of new articles from each of the ACS' 28 Web-based journals.

These collections of journals are currently linked via their logos from the Libraries' Electronic Journals (http://library.gmu.edu/resources/journals.html) Web page. However, the Libraries also provide an alphabetical list of electronic journals on this same Web page, regardless of publisher or vendor. Students can therefore click on individual journal titles and reach the journal in question more directly. Journal titles are constantly being added to and removed from the alphabetical list to increase their use and visibility and to maintain an accurate presentation of available titles. Graduate students and faculty will find this list especially useful. Even so, the list does not currently contain all the electronic journals to which the Libraries subscribe because of the rapidly changing e-journal environment.

The Libraries are also adding individual titles for electronic journals to the Library Catalog (http://magik.gmu.edu), which will facilitate seamless retrieval of full-text information via the Catalog. Students will be able to search for a specific title from the Catalog, then go to the record for that journal which will contain an embedded URL (Uniform Resource Locator), allowing direct linking to the journal in question. Over time, the seamlessness of this process will increase, further easing research for students and faculty alike.

Conclusion

The pedagogical issues raised by electronic journals cannot be ignored because the numbers of journals in this format are increasingly rapidly and student expectations regarding their usefulness are ever higher. Careful attention to undergraduates' overall research processes and sophisticated promotion of these resources with graduate students, however, will allow faculty to fit electronic journals into the new electronic research paradigm for all students. The advantages of convenient, 24-hour-a-day access, full-text searching capabilities, interdisciplinary connections, and the most current research articles offered electronically will only become more apparent in the future.

Used effectively, electronic journals have enormous potential for increasing research sophistication and engaging more students in communities of research practice that enliven class discussions, improve awareness of a wide variety of fields and disciplinary points of view, and enhance campus conversations about learning and inquiry in general.

Notes and References

Kuhlthau, Carol Collier. (1993). Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.