Research Essentials Week 5 Notes
Using Library Databases to Find Periodicals
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 and the Information Timeline
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.
