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Databases & Periodicals
  
 
Newspapers, Popular Magazines, or Scholarly Journals
 
 
 
  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 for Research

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 on 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 for information are:

  • Author
  • Title of the article
  • Subject of the article
  • Keywords within the title or body of the text
Let's look for articles regarding our topic "World War II " & "Pearl Harbor"