— Okay, you've convinced me...! But how do I find these periodical articles?

 

To find periodical articles you will need to use a periodical database.  We also call them article databases.

Not at all...  Imagine a book index.  When you want to look up an idea in a book, you use the index, right?  So that you don't have to flip through all the pages in the book?

Article databases work exactly the same way.  Except that they act as an index to a large number of magazines and journals (and newspapers) instead of one book.  Remember we said earlier than you cannot use the library catalog to look for magazine and journal articles?  Well, the article database is your answer. 

So, when you type your search string into an article database, the computer will go off and find articles from the many magazines and journals indexed by the database.  Not only does it save you a lot of time since you won't need to look through all those periodicals yourself, it also gives you access to a great number of periodicals that our library does not own!