Newspapers, magazines, and journals are called periodicals because they are issued on a regular or "periodic" basis. Periodicals are usually separated into two major groups: popular and scholarly. If you are able to recognize the differences between a popular and scholarly source, you can focus your research to retrieve only the type of articles you need.

Periodical articles can be found in a variety of ways:

• By browsing the cumulated years of a particular title until you find a suitable item
• By using a print index
• By using an electronic database

To find a list of the online databases that are accessible to you, as a Bloomsburg University student, go to the Library Home Page> Databases A-Z

From there you can select the database that best fits your area of interest.

Most databases are larger, aggregated collections of data than most print indexes. And because many of them include the complete articles of full text, the words within the articles are searchable by keyword. Although there are multiple ways of searching in an online database, the main ways of searching are:

• Author
• Title of the article
• Subject of the article
• Keywords within the title or body of the text

Let's try a practice search.