[KS] Korean academic journals online

[Brother Anthony]

A discussion in the Facebook Koreanists group has made me realize that many people do not know about a recent development in the availability of articles published in academic journals in Korea. Until now such articles were available to some extent, often on purchase, through the commercial site DBpia. This has now been replaced by the National Research Foundation's own site, where it seems that most if not all the academic associations which have been approved (1768 journals 등재) or are candidates for approval (408 journals 후보) have been persuaded to upload the electronic texts of the articles published in their journals since 2002. There are no limitations, no signing up or signing on is needed. 

The pages are available in Korean and in English. The starting point for a search of journal titles (학술지검색)  is at https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/po/search/poSereSear.kci  and there a choice can be made between working in Korean or English (but almost all the journals listed are in fact in Korean with Korean names of course, but everything has been translated). Assuming that one knows the title of the journal required, that is typed as the search term (or the ISSN, or the publishing organization's name). Clicking the search button gives a page with basic information about the journal and, most important, a link to "최근발행정보 / Current issue" and clicking on that date opens a smaller window containing not only the TOC of the latest volume available but also a drop-down menu giving access to the TOC of every volume (and number) published since 2002. Clicking on the title of an article brings the English-language abstract into the first search page and there is (at least in the best, though not all cases) a button after the title of the article above the abstract marked "KCI 원문" which opens a PDF file of the complete article. This file can then be saved, searched, or portions can be copied and pasted. The label 'KCI' Korean Citation Index suggests that the motivation for this new initiative is to increase the number of citations of Korean journals in international scholarly activity, but the entire resource is of course enormously helpful, especially when the full text is available. Searches by the article's title or the author's name or by topic are also possible, of course.

I think many might want to know about this. Perhaps others can expand or improve on this basic information.

Brother Anthony
Sogang / Dankook Universities