When you enroll on a unversity degree programme, you should be assigned with an ID and a password to access university e-library. This facility is very useful because you can access all the refereed journals and e-books via Internet-access to the e-library. The problems are:
a. you may be reluctant to read academic articles and somehow also believe that they are not useful or only useful for doing assignments/ dissertation reports.
b. you are not able to find useful articles (especially via the e-library search engine) or believe that the e-library does not have much resource (as many of the articles need to be paid for by you in order to download; this may be due to some flaw in the system authentication process. I suggest to log out and then log in again for another try).
The e-library is very important for you to do literature review and learn literature review skill. If you are not able to learn this skill of literature review, you miss a very important research skill that is very useful for your long-term career development and job performance support. And if your university does not subscribe useful refereed journals for you to access, you should send a email to the university head and ask him/her for a refund of your school fee.
Over the years, in the academic world, the main academic publishers have launched quite a number of academic journals; there is just an explosion in academic publications in various business/ engineering subjects. Let's say, if we are talking about 4 main academic publishers and, for a particular subject you are interested in, there are 4 journals per publisher. Now, each journal publishes 5 issues each year with 6 articles (as an estimate). The total number of articles per year would be 489. Apparently, you will not be just interested in 1 subject. Assume you need to be briefed on 4 subjects most of the time, the total number of articles you need to read from the academic sources are 1920 articles. This is a very conservative estimate.
Do not write off these academic articles as not practical; some are of little practical value, but many do. If you are unaware of all these ideas and findings from these sources, you can become uncompetitive.
Three things to note at this point: (a) try to learn how to do literature review, not just for the sake of doing assignments or dissertation reports, but for the sake of your own professional development; literature review skill is an important research skill that can be employed in your work setting with much practical value (b) try to find out how to access e-library after you have graduated from the university. As a professional, you need to have a convenient way to access e-library. As a university graduate, you probably are required to spend an annual fee in order to access your university e-library; (c) do not just rely on the e-library search engine for searching; browse through the academic journals and develop the interest to read academic journal articles as a leisure reading; these articles are entertaining and intellectually stimulating. For a start, you can access a major academic journal publisher via your e-library account and see what journals are published by this publisher; then you browse through the content of a journal published by it that you find interesting.
Quite a number of my students find academic journal articles difficult to read; you need to keep trying as there is a learning curve for that. The reward of reading academic journal articles is tremendous from a professional development perspective. There are many brilliant people around the world, spending lots of time, to elaborate on their concrete findings in these journals. Many of these findings and ideas are very stimulating and can inform you in your immediate works and career development.
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