You can find thousands of articles in magazines and journals in the library's databases. What is a database? A collection of the online versions of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles that can be searched and accessed online.
Click on one of the multi-disciplinary databases like Academic Search Complete or use the pull-down menu to select databases in your subject area. If you are off campus, you will see a login page at this point prompting you to enter your student ID. Once you are in the database, you can search for articles and then download or email them to yourself.
Additionally, utilize Flipster to find contemporary popular sources.
For more sources of background information, visit the A-Z Databases Encyclopedias listing.
Recommended Library Databases:
View the following video to find out how to distinguish between popular and scholarly articles:
In addition to books, a major source of information is periodicals, that is, magazines, newspapers, and journals. They're called periodicals because they are issued on a regular or "periodic" basis. Whereas books are good for providing comprehensive coverage of a topic, they tend to be broader in scope than some of the research topics you will be assigned in college. Most of the research you conduct will likely be from information found in periodical articles. Periodicals are ideal in the following situations:
