Locating Periodicals and Periodical Articles

There are several ways to locate periodical articles. To do a thorough job of research, more than one method must be employed.

1. Searching Periodical Databbases
• The most systematic means of locating periodical articles is to consult periodical indexes and abstracting services and databases. Most periodical indexes in the Ithaca College Library are now available online. By searching by subject or keyword in an index, you will first locate recordsproviding bibliographic citations. Citations will usually include the name of the author, the title of the article, the title of the periodical, the date of publication, the volume number, and the pages on which the article can be found.
• A growing number of databases not only index articles, but provide the full text of the article itself. Full text is a transcript of the words in the article. Full text usually leaves out pictures, charts, and graphs. Picture images of the original pages are available by some of the database services.
• Through ArticleLinker, most, but not all databases, make it possible to get to the full text of an article that is available in another database.
2. Browsing may be a good technique to locate information.
   • During the middle of a presidential campaign, if you know the political persuasion of some opinion magazines, you can easily find opposing viewpoints concerning candidates and issues, just be picking up a few of the most recent issues.
   • If you are researching teenage suicide, browsing the table of contents of both recent and back issues of the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior will likely be productive in finding appropriate articles.
   • Often local papers are not indexed well are at all. For example, the library does have the Ithaca Journal on microfilm from 1914 to present, but NewsBank, the only index to it, includes only the last couple years. To track down earlier news stories covered in the Ithaca Journal, you must determine the right time frame and then plow through back issues page by page or microfilm screen by screen.
3. Checking "works cited" lists.
   • Articles in a peer reviewed journal usually have bibliographies of works cited. The researcher, in selecting articles for a bibliography, should be listing only significant articles, so the bibliography is an evaluative list of additional articles that may be useful for your own research.