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 This has now been replaced by the National Research Foundation's own site, where it seems that most if not all the academic associations which have been approved (1768 journals 등재) or are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/sear ... reSear.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

Let me add a note about the "Korea Citation Index":

The index very useful to as a bibliographical search engine, but much less so to find "free" *full-text* versions of articles. This does in no way REPLACE commercial databases such as dbpia.co.kr and others (even RISS charges for many -- obviously, and naturally so, because publishers need to make some profit somewhere).

But here are a few little practical tips -- an EXAMPLE:

Korea Citation Index
https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/po/sear ... arList.kci
I type the name one of a well established Korean art history journal in the search window:
미술사논단
Looking at the list of articles I then get, the FIRST one that shows as "downloadable" (PDF) is #6 -- with that "KCI원문" tag, as Brother Anthony explained.
--> "고대 동남아시아의 귀걸이 전통과 그 영향"
However, dbpia.co.kr, for example, offers them ALL as downloadable PAID PDFs.
See e.g. #2 in that list:
"초상에 담지 못한 사대부의 삶: 이명기와 김홍도의 <徐直修肖像>"
--> http://goo.gl/gQ8VYZ
5,000원 is hefty for a single article, if you are not at an institution that subscribes to such an commercial service.

So, here come my three tips:

(1) Very many of these journals do have their sub-pages (home pages) at whatever institution publishes the journal. If this is a journal from your own field of study, you may spend a little time to find the home page of the journal, and then just download the articles you are interested in there, for free -- not always but very often possible.
For THIS example this would be:
http://www.casasia.org/page.asp?pageid= ... num=020300
-->
http://www.casasia.org/page.asp?pageid= ... &d_seq=488
-->http://www.casasia.org/file/digest/34-5%28hwa%29.pdf

Sometimes these article postings at the institutions are also indexed by Google, but often the Web admins have added a "noindex" tag to the folders that contain them, exactly because they also distribute them for a fee over those commercial sites. With the above example, this seems the case -- a Google search leaves me without luck. In short, with journals you expect to have published several important articles for your field of interest, it does make sense to spend some time to look for their home pages, and then bookmark the sites for future searches.

(2) If you know the home pages of the journal or the publishing institution that an article you try to get the full-text PDF for, you can much faster find it by limiting a Google search to the that domain and the actual file. Just put the domain name PLUS : at the beginning of your search into the Google search window.

(3) The "National Digital Library" (국가전자도서관) has a wonderful search engine that searches in various full-texts databases of various Korean institutions and then shows you exactly (on top) how many entries it found and where -- and then it links directly to them. Not always to the free versions, though -- as in our above example. But all over I found this to be an amazingly (!!!) useful search engine.

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Frank Hoffmann
http://koreanstudies.com