Most of you are familiar with periodicals. Periodicals can take many forms, and there are thousands published in the United States alone. Periodicals include magazines, scholarly journals and newspapers. They are published daily, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, and annually. Periodicals are an excellent source of information for a variety of topics.
There are four main reasons for using periodicals:
Both magazines and periodicals can have a place in your research paper. But there are major differences in the two types of publications. Journals are more scholarly. There articles are usually written by experts in a particular area of study. Magazines tend to have covers with colorful pictures while journal's usually have rather dull and plain covers. Magazines may contain many pictures, and journals may contain a few charts and graphs. Journal articles are usually original publications, while magazines publish information on recent developments. As a bonus, journals often times have bibliographies which can lead to additional sources for the student.
Still puzzled about how to determine if your publication is popular or
scholarly? Here's a link to a more complete discussion -
Scholarly or Popular Materials: Discovering the
Differences.
Newspapers are usually published more frequently than magazines and journals. They are usually published daily or in some cases weekly. They tend to have shorter articles, they are full of advertising, and they answer the journalistic questions" who, what, when, why, where, and how.
Until recently, only larger newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times indexed their own articles. Now, with the advent of the computer, not only are many newspapers online; there are also several computerized newspaper indexes. Libraries subscribe to many different newspaper indexes; Taft College Library subscribes to NewsBank.
It would take a student hours and hours to select periodicals and scan through them looking for articles on a particular subject. Therefore libraries have indexes that have searched a vast number of subjects.
No Assignment for Section 5!