NOTE: All of the terms used on this page are in the Zetoc Glossary.
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The Zetoc service provides Z39.50-compliant access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC). The database gives access to over 30,000 journals, 52 million article citations and conference papers. Zetoc covers every imaginable subject in science, technology, medicine, engineering, business, law, finance, the arts and humanities. The database covers the years from 1993 to date and is updated daily. Abstracts are included for those titles whereby there is an agreement between the British Library and the publisher to provide this information.
Copies of articles and conference papers listed on the database are available from the British Library. There is a link to the British Library's document ordering facility from each full record page within Zetoc. Zetoc also inlcudes Open Access content from selected publishers. Open Access records in Zetoc display the Open Access symbol
and link to the full text on the publisher website.
Zetoc Search: enables you to search for citations of journal articles and conference proceedings via search forms, using one or more words in various fields, such as title, author and date.
Zetoc Alert: is a current awareness service that sends email Alerts matching your search criteria whenever relevant new data is loaded into the database. Alerts may include searches for journal titles and searches for authors' names and keywords from the titles of articles and papers. These email Alerts will be sent on the day the new data is loaded into the database, which is usually within 72 hours of publication.
Zetoc RSS: is an alternative means to subscribe to feeds for individual journals, enabling you to view the journal title, article titles and basic article information. A link to the full Zetoc record is also incorporated into the feed. Within Zetoc, we provide a list of journals with an RSS link beside each journal. You can subscribe to the feed in various ways, depending upon your chosen RSS reader.
The Zetoc service is made available through Jisc.
Zetoc is available free of charge to any member of a JISC-sponsored UK further or higher education institution.
Details on logging in to Zetoc are available in the Zetoc FAQ
From the Zetoc home page click on Zetoc Search. You will be given three choices:
Each of these provides a search form, with a number of fields you can use to specify your search, and then you can select individual articles to view the full record.
A search across all of the searchable fields: journal title; article title; paper title; authors; editors; publisher and conference data such as keywords, conference venue and sponsors.
A title search will search across both the journal article title and the conference paper title.
You may wish to enter significant words from the title or a complete title or phrase, which needs to be surrounded by quotation marks.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| “Climate change a sinking feeling” | full title of article, put in quotation marks to search just on this title |
| climate change | a search on climate AND change, both words must be present and can be in any order |
| “climate change” trend | a search on a phrase and an additional word search, climate AND change must be together and in that order, trend must also be present, but may appear anywhere in the title |
Enter single surnames or surnames with initials. You can use punctuation, as this will not affect the search. Do not enter two initials together without punctuation or a space between them.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| Shaw | single surname entry |
| Shaw Brown | both authors must be present in the record |
| “Shaw G B” | surname and initials of author |
| “Shaw G B” “Brown C L” | both authors must be present in the record |
| “Shaw G.B.” | Will retrieve the same as “Shaw G B” |
| “Shaw GB” | Will not retrieve any records, two or more initials together must have punctuation or a space between them. |
Enter the ISSN number for a journal, or the ISBN number for a conference paper.
This is a useful way to find the full contents for a journal or conference.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| 0020-8132 | Hyphen is optional |
| 0749245425 |
Enter a single date, a start date or a date range.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| 1998 | records just for 1998 |
| 1998- | records from 1998 onwards |
| 1998-2000 | records between a date range |
| Author(s): | Mefford, R. N. |
| Article Title: | Increasing productivity in global firms: The CEO challenge |
| Journal Title: | JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT |
| ISSN: | 1075–4253 |
| Year: | 2009 |
| Volume/Issue: | VOL 15; NUMBER 3 |
| Page(s): | 262–272 |
| Publication Frequency: | Quarterly: 4 issues per year |
| Publisher: | Great Britain : Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam. |
| Date Published: | 20090226 |
| Language: | English |
| Dewey Class: | 658 |
| LC Class: | HD9000 |
| BLDSC shelfmark: | 5007.673200 |
| Abstract: | In a highly competitive environment global firms face the challenge of increasing productivity to compete with firms sourcing production in low-wage developing countries. This paper presents a new paradigm of production which provides a solution to the productivity challenge. The new paradigm is both a philosophy of management and a set of methods that draw upon the experiences of firms employing quality management and lean production. This approach has proven to yield substantial gains in quality, productivity, and competitiveness. The methods and the requirements to successfully implement it are discussed. How to transplant these systems to developing countries is also considered. The role of the CEO in successful implementation of the New Productivity Paradigm is discussed in the final section. |
| Zetoc ID: | RN255644450 |
A search across all searchable fields: article title; author(s); journal title; ISSN; volume/issue; year published; publisher data.
Enter a word or significant words from the article title, or a complete title or phrase, surrounded by quotation marks. See the title search examples above.
See the author search examples above.
Enter a single word, significant words or a phrase, surrounded by quotation marks.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| management review | both words must be present, but not necessarily in this order |
| “management review” | searches for this phrase |
See the ISSN search examples above.
This searches for both the volume and issue number and you can enter one or both.
Generally both or just the issue number is given.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| 50 1 | search for volume 50, issue (or part) 1 |
| 5 | search for either volume 5 or issue 5 |
Usually this search is used in conjunction with volume and issue number.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| 245-254 | search for start AND end page |
| 245 | search for start OR end page |
See the year published search examples above.
| Authors: | Spahn, M.; Wulf, V. |
| Paper Title: | End–User Development of Enterprise Widgets |
| Keywords: | Human–computer interaction ; Computer programming |
| Conference: | End–user development; IS–EUD 2009 |
| Conference description: | Symposium; 2nd |
| Conference venue: | Siegen, Germany |
| Conference date: | 2009; Mar |
| Journal Title: | LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE |
| ISSN: | 0302–9743 |
| ISBN: | 9783642004254 |
| Year: | 2009 |
| Volume/Issue: | NO 5435 |
| Page(s): | 106–125 |
| Editor(s): | Pipek, Volkmar |
| Publisher: | Berlin; Springer; 2009 |
| Language: | English |
| Material type: | Selected papers |
| BLDSC shelfmark: | 5180.185000 |
| ZETOC ID: | CN071709575 |
A search across all searchable fields - paper title, author(s), conference data such as keywords from the conference name, sponsor, venue or date.
Searches for the title of the conference paper, which may include reports, presentations and abstracts. See the title search examples above.
See the author search examples above.
Keywords are assigned to each conference (not each conference paper).
They can be individual words or phrases, such as iodine or “iodine deficiency”.
A search for the conference name, sponsor, venue, description and date can be made in this field.
| Examples | Description |
|---|---|
| “Light modulation assessments of compact fluorescent lamps” | a search for a full conference title |
| "high speed" “light modulation” | a search for two search strings, both must be present in the retrieved records |
| “international biometric society” 2004 | a search for the sponsor and the year |
. Click on the Show More Record Detail button 
to display additional brief record information, including the abstract when available.Note: if your search retrieves more than 500 records, you will not be able to sort them.
Email your search results to an email account either from the Brief Records display or the Full Records display. The maximum number of results you can email is 500.
Records with Short labels contain abbreviated two-letter fieldnames e.g. AU for Author(s), TI for Article Title and so on, and may be more suitable for importing into reference management software. You should select this option if you wish to import records into EndNote using the filter available on the Zetoc website. Records with Long labels contain full–length fieldnames e.g. Author(s), Article Title etc.
The records are always emailed in Full Record format.
Note: if your search only retrieves one result, you will automatically be shown the Full Record.
It is possible to download the records from your search and save them in a plain text file suitable for importing into reference management software.
Records with Short labels contain abbreviated two–letter fieldnames e.g. AU for Author(s), TI for Article Title and so on, and may be more suitable for importing into reference management software. You should select this option if you wish to import records into EndNote using the filter available on the Zetoc website. Records with Long labels contain full–length fieldnames e.g. Author(s), Article Title etc.
Once you have a saved .txt file (text file), you can import it into your bibliographic software. However, please note that you must abide by the Zetoc terms and conditions of use.
This uses a wildcard, so it retrieves records where the term medical is present AND where any words beginning ethic are present, so it will retrieve both ethical and ethics.
You should remember to search for variant spellings as the database contains articles published in many different countries. For example, using labo* to retrieve the words labor and labour.
It is possible to view all the searches you have conducted during the current session.
Alongside your search term will be the number of hits (records retrieved), sort order and options.
Under Options you will see up to 4 hypertext links:
Note: if you previously tagged any of the records retrieved from this search, you will be able to email just those records. If you did not tag any records you will only be able to email them all.
Note: The British Library assigns keywords to each conference. You can only search for keywords in the conference search option.
Note: The Conference box allows you to search by conference name, date, description, venue and sponsor. Venue may be given as a country or a place name or both, e.g. Tokyo, Japan or just Tokyo. You may therefore not find all conferences held in a particular country, as the venue field may not include the name of the country.
Note: you must enter the volume and issue numbers in the order they appear in the records. Some journals will only have an issue number.
Your results will list all of the articles for one issue of the Journal of Garden History.
Note: If your institution has an OpenURL Resolver, this will provide links to relevant electronic services, and will include links to the full text where your institution has access rights. If your own institution does not have a Resolver, you will have a link to Copac, which will enable you to locate libraries that hold the journal.
Note: members of some institutions may be automatically signed in to Zetoc Alert when on-campus.
RSS is a format for delivering web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers offer their content as an RSS Feed.
A Zetoc RSS Feed will typically show the journal title, ISSN and publisher, together with the article titles and authors and the details of the journal issue and page numbers to keep you up to date.
To receive a RSS Feed you need a RSS reader. This is a piece of software that can check a list of feeds from Zetoc and display any updated articles that they find. There are many different versions of RSS readers, some of which are accessed using your web browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. The About Zetoc RSS page provides more information and links to further help.
button beside the journal to come to an XML file that contains information about the journal.
Note: Zetoc RSS feeds are updated on a monthly basis. If a journal is weekly, then you will get four feeds each month. If a journal is bi-monthly (every 2 months), you will get a feed for the month that it first appears in the Zetoc database. Feeds are kept for 1 month before they are removed from the Zetoc server.
All articles and papers in Zetoc are available from the British Library On Demand service. Click on the link to Buy from the British Library On Demand at the bottom of each full record record and complete a short online registration before ordering your documents.
In addition, there is a link to Request a copy from your Institution's Library, which facilitates making a document supply request.
Open Access records will have links to view the full text on the publisher website or Europe PMC from the Zetoc full record page.
For more information and step by step guidance on Zetoc Search, check out our helpful Zetoc Search Screencast video.
Last updated: April 2018. If you have any queries, comments or suggestions about the text or examples included in this workbook, please forward them to help@jisc.ac.uk
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