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Magazines can be divided into two categories: popular magazines and trade magazines. Both consist of articles on various topics, and both are printed on paper and delivered to paying subscribers in installments called issues – usually weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
Like newspapers, the first magazines started in Europe in the 1600s. According to the Statista website, in the United States there are over 7,000 different magazines currently published. And, of course, there are lots of magazines that used to exist but have ceased publication.
The purpose of a popular magazine might be to entertain, educate, inform, persuade – or any combination of these. Regardless of the purpose, popular magazines contain articles that are easy for anyone to read and understand. Many popular magazines delve into a particular interest or hobby such as interior design, autos, electronics, science, sports, travel, crafts, cooking, gardening, fashion, etc. The content in magazines tends to be highly variable and might include letters, quizzes, cartoons, short stories, quotes, gossip, puzzles, poems, book reviews, etc. – in addition to articles.
Examples of magazines include:
House Beautiful
Car and Driver
Scientific American
Wired
Sports Illustrated
Sky and Telescope
Some popular magazines are devoted to business and finance, for example:
The Economist
Forbes
Fortune
Entrepreneur
Bloomberg Business Week
And some popular magazines provide news articles, such as:
Time
Newsweek
The National Review
The Week
Foreign Affairs
Besides delivering news and entertainment, what are popular magazines good for?
Besides delivering news and entertainment, what are popular magazines good for?
Just like newspapers, magazines are a source of information for historians, sociologists, and other types of researchers who might gather and study content published in magazines to investigate social and cultural changes over time.
FYI - Even if you've never subscribed to a magazine, you might encounter paper copies of magazines for sale in bookstores or at your grocery store check-out. You also find them lying around in doctors' or dentists' waiting rooms as reading material while you wait for an appointment.
Trade magazines
Trade magazines
Trade magazines contain articles of interest to professionals working in a particular trade or industry. A trade magazine might include news and product information, latest best practices, market trends, regulatory or policy issues, or any other information that would be particularly helpful for readers wanting to keep up with that profession.
If you have plans to work in a certain type of industry or profession, you might want to check whether there are trade magazines that would be useful to subscribe to. How would you check? Just run some Google searches on the name of your profession along with the words trade magazines. Note that trade magazines are sometimes called trade journals, professional magazines, or professional journals, so you might want to substitute in some of those name variations when you run your searches in Google.
Examples of trade magazines include:
IEEE Communications
Advertising Age
Nation's Restaurant News
Chemical Week
Law Practice Magazine
QUESTION 1. Which type of source has more varied content and subject matter?
A. newspapers
B. magazines
(Answer at bottom of page.)
Magazine formats: print and electronic
Magazine formats: print and electronic
Print magazines look different from books or newspapers – typically they are printed on glossy paper and have lots of colorful photos, illustrations, and advertisements, and less text. Print issues of magazines are delivered in the mail to paying subscribers including individuals and libraries. If you want to browse through a magazine but you don't want to subscribe, then check to see if Cline Library has it.
The electronic – or online – version of a magazine may be available on the internet with links to articles and a search feature to look for previously published articles. To find the website for a particular magazine, simply do a Google search on the title of the magazine. It may help to add the word 'magazine' to your search. The online version will contain the same content as the print version, plus it may offer additional content and features.
Because magazine articles can be found online, it's common to discover them in your results when you search Google. Remember that Google search on 'coral reef conservation' that turned up a newspaper article? Well, it also turned up a magazine article as you can see to the right.
How would you know that the result entitled "Scientists are trying to save coral reefs" leads to a magazine article? The internet address for this result indicates it's coming from 'www.nationalgeographic.com' which is the internet address for the well-known magazine, National Geographic.
Experienced researchers can recognize the names of lots of different magazines, making it pretty easy for them to tell when they are looking at a magazine article they've found on the internet.
And naturally, as time passes, less-experienced researchers gain more experience with magazines and are better able to recognize them!
QUESTION 2. If you are an experienced researcher, you usually know when a Google result has landed you on a magazine's website because you've got lots and lots of magazine names stored away in your brain.
true
false
Locating a specific magazine article
Locating a specific magazine article
To find a particular magazine article, use the same techniques you learned for finding newspaper articles. First, try a search in Google to see if you can find it – just type the title of the magazine article into the Google search box. If you find it, click on it to see if you can open it and read the full article. But suppose you can't find the article or – when you click on it – you encounter a notice telling you that you have to pay to read the article. Again, this is called a paywall. In that case, go to Cline Library's website and try searching for the article using Quick Search.
Can't find a specific magazine article that you need using Quick Search? Then just request it through Cline Library's Document Delivery Service. You'll learn more about this service on the last page of Lesson 6: Get the sources you've chosen.
Browsing for magazine articles on a topic
Browsing for magazine articles on a topic
If you are looking for magazine articles on a topic, then don't use Quick Search because it doesn't provide a way to limit to just magazine articles.
Instead, try a different database offered by Cline Library called Academic Search Complete. To find it, click the link to Find Databases just under the Quick Search search box.
Once you click that link, the database Academic Search Complete will be the first database listed.
Once you've run a search on your topic, use the refinements to the left of your results to limit to Magazines:
Distinguishing magazine articles from other sources
Distinguishing magazine articles from other sources
Obviously if you are searching Academic Search Complete and you filter your results to Magazines as a material type (as discussed just above) then there won't be any ambiguity that the results you're looking at are magazine articles.
But, if you come across magazine articles while you are searching the internet, it can be harder to identify them. Unlike newspapers, magazines don't have names that include words like "tribune," "post," "dispatch," or "times" in the title. Magazine titles are much more varied. So, here are a couple of strategies that might help you identify an online magazine article:
Look for the presence of a search feature as well as links that invite you to subscribe or sign in.
Try looking up the name of the source (located above the article's title) in Wikipedia, to see if that helps you learn what type of source it is.
QUESTION 3. If you are an inexperienced researcher, it's harder to know when a Google result has landed you on a magazine's website because you have fewer magazine names stored away in your brain. However, you can try looking up the name of the website in Wikipedia to see if Wikipedia can confirm that the website is a magazine.
true
false
What's next?
What's next?
Answers to questions on this page:Question 1. BQuestion 2. trueQuestion 3. true
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