The OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center (EJC) has undergone a rebuild in recent months and our new, upgraded version is slated to launch on Aug. 4, right around the corner.
This new EJC will be a significant upgrade both in infrastructure and interface. The result is more accurate searching and an overall better experience for all of our users, as well as improved features for library staff who analyze and assess the content.
The EJC is OhioLINK’s one-stop shop for the latest journal articles from the best scholarly publishers. Access to high-quality published research is a key component in Ohio research institutions’ continuing success in supporting innovative research on campuses and winning funding from both industry and programs such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. It’s also a potent recruiting tool to attract graduate students, faculty, and researchers to Ohio institutions.
And it’s a resource that gets an unbelievable amount of use from the 93 member institutions in OhioLINK.
Did you know?
- Our EJC is a database that contains almost 26 million full-text articles in 11,000 journals from top scholarly publishers, academic societies and university presses.
- Each week, more than 50,000 new articles are loaded into the EJC.
- In one single day this past April, users downloaded 13,500 PDFs from the EJC from all over Ohio.
- OhioLINK users download 10 million article PDFs a year from the EJC and our publisher partners.
In the new EJC, the potential for returns is even greater, because we’ve added full-text searching. The current EJC searches across descriptive information like an article’s title, author and abstract, but the new EJC does this in addition to searching the complete text of an article. The result is more relevant search results for the user.
For example, OhioLINK’s Manager of Member and User Services Meghan Frazer has been hard at work doing numerous tutorials and demonstrations for the new EJC. In a particular demo of the EJC’s ability to search the latest in medical research in this database, across publishers – and since OhioLINK is a big participant in Pelotonia – Meghan searches for BRCA1, a specific genetic mutation that causes breast cancer.
In the old EJC system, this returned about 6,500 results. In the new system, the results number 40,000. She points out you can do the same thing by searching for Pelotonia – the current EJC does not return any results, but the new EJC returns about 100 articles which mention Pelotonia in the full text. Relevancy ranking still privileges search terms in the title, abtract, and article keywords, but full-text searching now enables expanded discovery.
In addition to full text searching, the new EJC allows you to download PDFs directly from the search results list – saving researchers’ time with fewer clicks. Users can also create multiple lists of articles for later reference, save searches and set up an email alert to be notified when favorite journals publish new articles.
All in all, the new EJC is a rich, dense resource that is a significant step up from what was offered in the past. And if you’re intrigued by the opportunities in the new EJC, or you’d like more guidance about making the switch from old interface to new one, we are here to help.
We’re offering a variety of demos and webinars to help you get up and running on the new EJC as soon as it launches. Check out our YouTube channel to see short videos for features of the new EJC.
If you are an EJC user, and you have questions or concerns, open a ticket with OhioLINK support at support@ohiolink.edu.
