In periodical indexes, you still look up the information by topic, but the index gives you much more than just a page number. It also tells you the title of the article, the author, the title of the periodical, the page number the article begins on, and sometimes, the length of the article. All of this information is referred to as a citation. One advantage of using periodical indexes is that many of them contain abstracts, or short summaries of the articles. Some of the articles also appear on the computer in full text , so you can sit down and read the entire article right on the computer.
Periodicals are for recent information and often feature one specific aspect of the subject .
Before you actually go to the computers to begin your search, take a few minutes to plan how you are going to do the search. Use enough words to describe your subject, but no more than necessary. In addition to the general topic, you should also use the most specific word to describe the aspect of your topic that you are going to concentrate on. Choosing the best words to serve as keywords or key phrases helps you to state your search more accurately. The computer will look for articles which have both these words appearing in the record.