Periodical indexes You cannot find periodical articles in the library catalog. You must use a periodicals index. To find a periodicals index on the World Wide Web, go to the library home page. Click on the link By Subject next to Electronic Resources. Click on General Indexes or one of the subject areas.
Some indexes have abstracts, or summaries of the items included in their database of citations.
Abstracts are extremely useful because they give you a clue about the value of the journal article or item. ASAP indexes now include full-text of articles in a large selected list of periodicals. Ebsco Host and UMI ProQuest also have many full-text journals. Project Muse is a good choice to explore for humanities. In the near future, academic libraries will offer more and more full-text resources.