Your professor requires that you use 3 articles as sources of information for your paper, but why?
Magazine, newspaper and journal articles are usually:
- More up-to-date; periodicals are published much more frequently than books.
- More specific; they address more specific topics instead of the broad subject areas usually covered by books.
- Shorter in length; articles provide more concise information for when you don't need a long treatise on your topic.
- More numerous; more articles are published than books.
- Current events; periodicals are more likely to be current about more newsworthy or controversial topics.
Now, where can you find articles? The NSCC libraries subscribe to a small number of print periodicals. You could come by the library or go to a news stand and look through the individual magazines, but this could take a long time. An easier way would be to use the library's periodical databases. The NSCC Libraries subscribe to a number of electronic periodical databases that index millions of articles.
Periodical databases are great resources for research.
- They offer an easy way to search for articles on a specific subject.
- Search capabilities allow you to combine search terms and search many periodicals and years at once.
- A periodical database search will get better, more relevant results, than an Internet search engine.
- The authors of periodical articles are more likely to have credentials in their fields than authors of general websites.
- Librarians have carefully selected these databases because of the quality of the information they index.
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