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How to use library databases to find periodicals such as newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. It highlights the differences between these types of periodicals and provides tips for evaluating sources. The document also discusses the information timeline of periodicals and how they tend to be published soon after an event happens. The main focus is on the periodical databases available at the Fort Steilacoom and Puyallup libraries.
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Research Essentials Week 5 Notes
Collectively, newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals are called periodicals because they get published periodically (like every day for newspapers, every week or month for magazines, and usually every month or so for scholarly journals). Both the Fort Steilacoom and the Puyallup libraries have some print periodicals, most of our periodicals will be found online. Here are some examples: The periodical databases we'll be looking at this week are much larger than the Gale Virtual Reference Library, so you'll be even more likely to find many articles that could help you respond to sub-questions in the periodical databases. You'll also find a greater range of opinion and bias in periodical articles than in subject encyclopedias, which is not necessarily bad. It's just good to be aware of this so that you're prepared to think about how a source's agenda might cause the author to shape information the way that they do--and also to help you stay aware of how your own biases and agenda might cause you to favor some sources and ignore others.
Periodicals tend to be published fairly soon after an "event" happens. In addition, since newspapers and magazines, in particular, are a more "reactive" form of publication (that is, reacting to an event by reporting on it soon after it happens), so their coverage tends to be more specific/more microscopic/less broad than coverage in books and subject encyclopedias. Scholarly journals get lumped into the periodicals category because they are published periodically, but they're actually very different than newspapers and magazines. While newspapers and magazines are published for a general audience, scholarly journals are published for an audience of scholars, researchers, and professionals. While they look very similar to magazines, the articles in these scholarly journals are often reports of research studies that have been conducted and produced by professional scholars and other experts. Here's an example of a scholarly journal article Links to an external site. about the potential for reusing face masks, published in the journal Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control.
By the way, if you're thinking to yourself, "Wow, this article looks kind of hard to understand," you're right. Since the audience for scholarly journal articles is other researchers and people who are already experts, the writing tends to be at a very high level, and they use a lot of specialized vocabulary. These are hard for me, too, and really they'd be challenging to read for 99.9% of all people. But, you are absolutely capable of reading scholarly articles! If you focus on a few key sections in the article rather than the whole thing, it can be easier to read the article and pull out information that can help you answer some of your research questions. I'll include some specific tips for how to read these scholarly articles more efficiently on the next page. I think that will be helpful for any of you who are in classes (or will be in classes) where professors want you to read and use scholarly journal articles. That probably includes all of us!