Periodical Indexes

Goal:    to promote more sophisticated research on any given topic by exploring and evaluating specialzed indexes

Instructions:

Visit the ASU Library page, which is where you will do your research for the semester. You can feel very good about using this site since you are paying for it with your tuition dollars. Take a moment to look at the site home page and the services offered by the library. Note that if you are working off-campus you will need to log in to the site to access the library. This is because you are paying lots of cash to use it.

The ASU library not only houses print copies of journals, they also pay money to subscribe to online periodical indexes that give you access to thousands of journals. You can think of the library as existing in two places: on campus, and online. You can do excellent research by using the library's online resources. Please note that when citing a source that was found using a periodical index, you will list the source as an article rather than as a web site. Think of using a periodical index like using a library to find a book—you would not cite the library you used to find the book, just as you would not cite the periodical index you used to find the article

From the Library Home Page, choose "Find." On the "Find" page click on "Articles by topic" and study this page for a minute. (Please note that to find articles you must first leave the ASU site and enter the Index site.) You will see that indexes are sorted two ways: by name and by broad subject category. Start looking at these lists to see how many different indexes there are. You will see that the library subscribes to over a hundred specialized periodical indexes that gather and list millions of scholarly articles that have been published over the years. The more of these indexes you use for your research, the more tuition dollars you are taking advantage of.

When you click on the index name it will take you to a gateway page that looks like this. Click on the hotlink at the top of the page to get to the actual index. By doing this you are leaving the ASU site and entering the periodical index.

Many students find that they prefer to use a particular index or they have a lot of luck getting sources from some popular indexes. One of the most popular is called Academic Search Premier /EBSCOhost. This index is pretty easy to use, and you can limit your searches to scholarly sources. Spend a moment searching in Ebscohost on your topic to become familiar with its features.

Next, choose 3 indexes other than Ebscohost and do a quick search on your current paper topic. Then evaluate all 3 indexes by answering the following questions for each separate index: