1. Problem

Many students do not know that the their libraries subscribe to thousands of periodicals (magazines, journals, newspapers--items that are published at intervals with no end in sight).

Some students end up paying for articles they could have gotten for free through their institution's library.

Others may not know how to distinguish periodical citations from citations for other sorts of materials, such as book chapters.

See Expected Learning Outcomes (below) and Methods (to the right) for help with this problem.

2. Expected Learning Outcomes

After completing an exercise or going through an online tutorial or handout, all students will locate library subscriptions to three or more periodicals, in order to get copies of articles for free.

3. Methods

Exercise--in-class (10 min.)

• • Distribute copies of "Which is Which" exercise. (See "Exercises & Handouts")

  • Ask students to pair up or work individually to identify types of materials by looking at the citations.

  • Go through the list of citations and ask students to call out answers.

  • Then ask students to locate two journals online or in paper by using the library catalog.

Online Tutorial:

"Road to Research: Find It!: Periodicals" (lessons and interactive exercises)

"Road to Research: Find It!: Periodicals" (2 min. video)

4. Assessment

"Road to Research: Find It! Quiz" (Guest)

Note: Links above are to archived copies of pages in the Internet Archive, as the "Road to Research" is temporarily unavailable as of 16 Sep 2015 due to revision work on the UCLA Social Sciences Computing Center's website.

In addition, this tutorial has not been maintained by the UCLA Library since Summer 2011, and some portions may be out of date. It is used here as an example.