Extended A-Z BrowZine Web Search

Modified on Fri, 30 Sep, 2022 at 10:05 AM

Introducing your new A-Z Journal Lookup!

This enhancement to the BrowZine Journal Engagement Platform allows BrowZine to load all of your serials that have at least an ISSN or eISSN into a single, simple interface.  BrowZine focuses on scholarly journal content and covers tens of thousands of journals from over 1,000 of the world's top scholarly publishers. However, libraries typically also have a lot of other serials in their collection.  These include publications such as:

  • Trade journals
  • Popular Titles
  • Very small press titles
  • Newspapers
  • Government documents
  • Scholarly Journals that went out of print many years ago

Since the majority of searches are either for the top-ranked titles that are BrowZine enabled or for a general subject (i.e. "marketing" or "surgery") the BrowZine Enabled Titles and Subjects are returned first at the top of the result set followed by titles available "outside of BrowZine".  For example, in the below screenshot, we have searched for "History of Science":


... which at this sample library their holdings include the journal History of Science (Sage) and this also matched the title The British Journal for the History of Science (Cambridge) as well as BrowZine's Category "History of Science, Technology, and Medicine" which leads to a number of different titles with content in that category but without the phrase "history of science" in the name.


Thus, this single search serves the dual purposes of helping a user find a journal with this name (if that is what they were going for) as well as helping to point out journals from the library collection that fit that category if the user was instead thinking more broadly and not of a specific title:


The two unsupported titles include a newsletter without scholarly articles and The Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Science which was last published in 1961.


If you do select one of these titles outside of BrowZine, the user is automatically routed, via ISSN lookup*, to the library's knowledge base/link resolver so that the user can continue on their path to full text.  Otherwise, selecting a journal or subject within BrowZine brings you to the tables of contents and then full text content quickly and easily.  Providing the full listing of titles in a library's A-Z Journal lookup optimizes the entire journal engagement experience by ensuring that if a user is looking for a newspaper, for example, they find it quickly in BrowZine and do not have to search for it in two locations making BrowZine an excellent choice as the main gateway to your serials collection!


This feature has been greatly requested by libraries and we are pleased to bring this to our subscribers who are utilizing BrowZine as their primary journal A-Z interface.  At this time, this feature is only available for the web version of BrowZine and the external results are not visible on the mobile app versions of BrowZine.  If you have any further questions about this enhancement, please contact us at support@thirdiron.com.


* = While ISSN look is preferable for its specificity, some customers may not have the ability to search their knowledge base by ISSN and thus a workaround to search by journal title is performed.