What are articles?

Articles appear in periodicals--magazines, journals, and newspapers. An article may be a single-page story in a newspaper, a five-page report in a consumer magazine, or a 30-page study appearing in a medical journal.

For most college-level research, it is important to understand The Difference Between a Popular Magazine Article and a Scholarly Journal Article.

Why use articles for research?

• Authority.  Articles generally must be approved by an editor or peer review process before publication.
• Currency. Current events are followed and analyzed by news magazines long before they are studied in books.
• Currency. Information on the latest products, trends, research, and theories often appears first in magazines and journals.
• Comprehensiveness.  Articles are written on a vast array of topics in every field and for every interest, so they are a good place to look for hard-to-find information.

3 Steps to Finding an Article

There are three steps in the process of finding periodical articles.

STEP 1:

Find references to relevant articles by using periodical indexes and abstracts.

STEP 2:

Retrieve the necessary information from the index or abstract.

STEP 3:

Get a copy of the actual article.

Please click here to learn about Step 1...

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