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Periodicals are publications issued at regular intervals such as magazines, journals, and newspapers. Magazines are general-interest publications; examples are U.S. News and World Report and People Weekly. Journals are specialized publications written for a scholarly or professional audience; examples of these are Journal of Social Psychology and American Libraries. Periodical articles are useful in research because they often present more current information than can be found in books.
To find magazine and journal articles, use a periodical index. The COM Library has several print periodical indexes. Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is a general periodical index, listing articles of broad interest. Other indexes are more specialized. Social Sciences Index, for example, lists articles in such disciplines as family studies, gerontology, sociology, and urban studies.
Each volume of a print periodical index covers a specific period of time. There may be a time lag of several months between the time an article is published and when it appears in an index.. For example, an article published in September 1997 may not appear in an index until 1998.
Useful descriptive information is often included in the prefatory pages in the front of each index volume. Suggestions on how to use the index, lists of general abbreviations and periodical title abbreviations, and an alphabetical list of the periodicals indexed may be found in the prefatory sections.
Articles are organized in periodical indexes under subject headings. Each listing of a periodical article is a citation. Citations appear alphabetically by article title under each subject heading. A citation includes such information as the title of the article, the author's name, any special features included with the article, the title of the periodical, the volume number, the date of the issue, and the pages of the article. Following is a sample citation from Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature:
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