What is a periodical?
- PeriodicalsThese slides will help you understand the definition and different types of periodicals
Article Indexes
The principal database for identifying journal articles in history are:
- America: History & Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Index of literature covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present. The database indexes journals from 1964 to present and includes citations and links to book and media reviews.
- Historical Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more. Provides indexing of more than 1,700 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955.
There are several other very important article indexes, any of which might be crucial for research depending on the focus of your research:
Digitized Journal Collections
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Provides page images of back issues of the core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Users may browse by journal title or discipline, or may search the full-text or citations/abstracts. New issues of existing titles and new titles are added approximately on a weekly basis. The University of Illinois has access to the following JSTOR collections: Arts & Sciences I-XV, 19th Century British Pamphlets, Business IV, Global Plants, Hebrew Journals, Ireland, Life Sciences Collection, Lives of Literature, Security Studies, Struggles for Freedom - South Africa, Sustainability, and World Heritage Sites - Africa. - Project Muse This link opens in a new windowFull-text articles from more than 200 scholarly journals in history and the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences. Disciplines covered include literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. A brief bibliographic description of each title is given. Searches can be conducted across the full text of all journals in the database.
- Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
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Periodicals Archive Online is a major archive that makes the backfiles of scholarly periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences available electronically, providing access to the searchable full text of hundreds of titles. The database spans more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages.
Other Digitized Periodicals
- Rolling Stone Archive This link opens in a new windowThe backfile of Rolling Stone, from its launch in 1967 to the present. One of the most influential consumer magazines of the 20th-21st centuries, it initially sought to reflect the cultural, social, and political outlook of a generation of students and young adults. It has been a leading vehicle for rock and popular music journalism, as well as covering wider entertainment topics such as film and popular culture. Major journalists and authors to have contributed include Hunter S. Thompson, Patti Smith, and Tom Wolfe.
- American Periodicals This link opens in a new windowConsists of digitized reproductions of more than 1,100 eighteenth and nineteenth century American newspapers and periodicals. Derived from the acclaimed American periodicals series microform collection I, II, and III. This database contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals. American Periodicals Series Online (APS Online) includes digitized images of the pages of American magazines and journals published from colonial days to the dawn of the 20th century. Titles range from Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine and America's first scientific journal, Medical Repository; popular magazines such as Vanity Fair and Ladie's Home Journal; regional and niche publications; and groundbreaking journals like The Dial, Puck, and McClure's.
- African American Periodicals This link opens in a new windowAfrican American Periodicals, 1825-1995 features more than 170 wide-ranging periodicals by and about African Americans.
- Vogue Archive1892-present. Full color, searchable facsimiles of every issue, with garment type, designer and brand name indexes.
- Forbes Archive This link opens in a new window
The Forbes Archive contains indexing, abstracting, and full text for the complete archive of Forbes, beginning with its first issue in 1917 and ending in December 2000.--Publisher information.
- GenderWatch This link opens in a new windowGenderWatch is a full text database of unique and diverse publications that focus on how gender impacts a broad spectrum of subject areas. With its archival material, dating back to 1970 in some cases, GenderWatch is a repository of important historical perspectives on the evolution of the women's movement, men's studies, the transgendered community, and the changes in gender roles over the years. Publications include scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, and NGO, government and special reports.
- Harper's Bazaar Archive This link opens in a new windowA comprehensive, searchable archive of every page, advertisement, and cover of every issue of Harper's Bazaar from its first appearance in 1867 to the current month. Reproduced in high-resolution color page images and supported by fully searchable text and indexing, this resource provides access to a chronicle of 20th century American and international fashion, culture, and society, supporting researchers by offering a cultural lens into the modern era.
- LGBT Magazine Archive This link opens in a new windowThis database contains the archives of 26 of the most influential periodical publications covering LGBT interests from 1954-2015. It includes publications from both the US and UK. This resource also caters to interests in many related fields, such as 20th-century history, sociology, health studies, political science, and psychology.
- Women's Magazine Archive This link opens in a new windowAn archival research resource comprising the backfiles of leading women's interest consumer magazines. Issues are scanned in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century through to 2005 and these key primary sources permit the examination of the events, trends, and attitudes of this period. Among the research fields served by this material are gender studies, social history, economics/marketing, media, fashion, politics, and popular culture.
- News, Policy, and Politics Magazine ArchiveAn archival collection comprising the backfiles of 15 major magazines (including the Newsweek archive), spanning areas including current events, international relations, and public policy. These titles offer multiple perspectives on the contemporary contexts of the major events, trends, and interests in these fields throughout the twentieth century. The collection will provide valuable primary source content for researchers in fields ranging from history and political science, through to law and economics.
- Independent Voices This link opens in a new windowA four-year project to digitize over one million pages from the magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers of the alternative press archives of participating libraries spanning the 1960's to the 1980's. Starting with collections by feminists and the GI press, the collection will grow to include small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American) and the extreme right-wing press
From Citation to Source: Journal Articles
If you have a citation for a journal article, and you want to obtain a copy of that article, you first need to determine whether the Library owns a copy of the journal issue. Therefore, the most important piece of information when beginning a search for a known journal article is the title of the journal, not the title of the article.
You will first check to see if we have online access to that journal. To do that, you will search for the journal (by title) using a catalog rather plainly named "Online Journals and Databases":
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University of Illinois Library Catalog: Journal Search A catalog of the Library's journal collection, with emphasis on online journals and periodicals. Most useful as a catalog of e-journals, but you can also use it to locate print copies.
If the Library does not have online access to that journal issue, then you will check to see if we have it in print. To determine whether the Library owns the journal in print, you will search the regular Library Catalog:
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University of Illinois Library Catalog Use the Library Catalog to identify books, journals (but not journal articles), microform collections, and digital collections owned by the University of Illinois. The Library Catalog is the primary tool for exploring the collections of the University of Illinois Library, the second largest academic library collection in the United States. In the Library Catalog you can search for books by subject, and you identify the location within the Library of a particular book or journal. Books and journals are organized in the library by subject. Each item is assigned one or more subject headings and a unique call number. Subject headings are standardized terms from the Library of Congress. The call number is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification or Library of Congress Classification. Boolean operators must be capitalized if used: AND, OR, NOT. Interface automatically truncates some search terms unless Boolean operators are used within the same query line. You can also browse catalog records by call number, creating a "virtual shelf browsing" experience.
If the Library does not have a print copy of the journal, then you will use your complete citation to request a copy through interlibrary loan:
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ILLiad (Interlibrary Loan) If the item is not available in the Illinois catalog and it is not available through I-Share, then your next stop will be Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery. Login to Interlibrary Loan using your NetID and password. If you are requesting a book, then select "Request a Book". If you are requesting a journal article, then select "Request a Photocopy". Be sure to fill out as much of the form as possible. You'll be notified by email when your item is ready to be picked up. If you requested a journal article, it will probably be sent to you electronically as a PDF.
Interlibrary loan can usually obtain a journal article for you very quickly (much faster than for books), sometimes within one day.