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Introduction to Periodicals

Periodicals are everywhere. They're the newspapers that appear on doorsteps every morning, the magazines at the grocery store checkout line, and the academic journals instructors want students to use in their research papers. Periodical articles can be read both in print and online.

There are thousands and thousands of periodicals to choose from, including:

national newspapers such as the New York Times,
regional newspapers such as the Richmond Times Dispatch,
magazines such as Newsweek and Washingtonian,
journals such as the Journal of African American History, and
periodicals for niche groups (e.g., Antiques & Collecting Magazine, Basketball Digest, Backpacker) and trade groups (e.g., Air Traffic Management, Advertising Age, American Drycleaners).

In Unit 2, we started looking at some of the differences in the type of information provided by magazines, newspapers, and journals. Newspapers, since they're published daily, tend to be one of the first places to report on an event, while magazines and journals, since they're published less often, have more time to do an analysis of an event. Let's take a closer look at the differences between magazines and journals.

	Popular Magazines	Scholarly Journals
Purpose	To provide general information or to entertain	To report on original research/in-depth studies on specialized subjects
Language	Appropriate for a broad, general audience	Technical language, jargon of the discipline, appropriate for scholars
Appearance	Include advertising and photographs	Contain little advertising May contain charts and graphs, but usually no photographs
Documentation	Sources may be mentioned, but rarely fully cited or included in bibliographies	Sources are cited in footnotes or bibliographies
Authors	Magazine staff, free-lance writers, reporters	Scholars or researchers in the field
Peer-reviewed	No	Yes – often reviewed by the author's peers before publication
Publishing Schedule	Usually weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly	Quarterly, twice a year
Examples	Sports Illustrated, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Psychology Today	Political Quarterly, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Applied Social Psychology

To find an article on your topic, whether from a magazine, journal, or newspaper, you have a few options (click on each link for more information):

Flip through magazines and newspapers and hope there's an article on your topic,

Go to individual magazine and newspaper websites (e.g., www.washingtonpost.com, www.newsweek.com) and search for articles there,

Google your topic,

Go to Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com), which searches through hundreds of periodicals in databases , or

Search an online library periodical database or two (each database typically has articles from hundreds of different periodicals) and read the articles for free .

While each of the first four strategies listed above could be appropriate for particular circumstances, in most cases when you need to find a periodical, the last option is the best choice because it is efficient and cost-effective.

Most periodical websites, such as www.washingtonpost.com, will only let you read a few articles for free (usually only the most recent articles). If you want older articles, the periodical websites will ask you to pay for them. You don't need to do this! NOVA's periodical databases provide online access to the Washington Post (and thousands of other periodicals) going back many years.
Question: How many years back do you think NOVA provides online access to the Washington Post?

a. 1 year

b. 5 years

c. 20 years

d. More than 100 years