After you have acquainted yourself with the topic you would like to research, your next step will be to search for articles on that topic in periodicals. You may have heard a librarian or your instructor use the word periodical and wondered just what they were talking about. Well, very simply, a periodical is a publication that comes out more than once a year. Newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals are all examples of periodicals.
Periodicals are made up of articles. Articles are shorter works on various subjects authored by, for instance, scholars, editorial boards or free-lance writers. Because they can often be published more quickly than books, periodical articles are a good source for very current information. Articles often offer very focused, specific information on a topic. In this respect, the subject of an article can be quite narrow. For example, an article might report on the latest findings of a study on child abuse in a certain segment of society in a certain country.
All periodicals, however, are not the same. Some are published for the general public, while others are intended for a scholarly audience. For example:
Magazines--General interest publications; article author may not be identified; usually no list of references at the end of the article; usually articles are non-technical in nature. National Geographic is an example of a magazine.
Journal--Specialized publications for experts in different fields of academic and/or professional study; articles always have author or authors; usually provide a list of references at the end of the article; articles are technical and intended for specialists. Journal of Philosophy is an example of a scholarly journal.
Depending on your assignment, your instructor may ask you to use only information you have found in journal articles to write your paper. There are various reasons for this sort of limitation. Journal articles are reviewed and evaluated by experts before they are published to ensure that the information presented is accurate and reliable. Journal articles are written by specialists in a field of study for others in that same or related fields and for this reason tend to be thorough and detailed. For more information about journal articles in general please see our Journal Tutorial.
To find articles on your topic you could always just leaf through magazines or journals until you came to an article you liked. However that is time consuming and not the most efficient way to find what you need. To find an article on your subject you need to use a periodical index. The library has two types of indexes that you may use to find articles in periodicals: printed indexes and electronic indexes.
Printed indexes (these look like books and are shelved in the reference area) are published every year and index a certain number of magazines or journals. The printed index in the AVC library that would be useful for doing research on philosophy is the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature functions much like the yellow pages in your phone book. Like the businesses arranged alphabetically by subject in the yellow pages, article citations (author, title, journal title, date, pages etc.) are arranged alphabetically by subject. If you were to look up the subject Plato in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature you would see articles about the philosopher Plato. For more information about using printed indexes, please see the librarian.
Electronic indexes are very much like printed indexes except they are accessed by computer. To search for your topic in an electronic index you type in keywords that describe your topic. The electronic index searches its database for articles with your keywords and lists them for you to look at. A useful electronic index for doing research in philosophy would be EBSCOhost. EBSCOhost contains full-text articles from over 3,000 periodicals from the early 1990s to the present. (If you have not yet completed the EBSCOhost tutorial you might wish to do so at this time.) EBSCOhost may be searched using the computers in the Library or Learning Center. It is also accessible from home. Please come to the Reference Desk or call 722-6300 x6276 for more information.