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General Science Index Lesson

It is easy to recognize the General Science Index by its blue cover. Because the General Science Index is also published by the H.W. Wilson Company it works very much like the Readers' Guide. The index is published monthly with quarterly and annual cumulations.

The General Science Index contains much of the same introductory matter as does the Readers' Guide. Both the General Science Index and the Readers' Guide provide a list of the periodicals indexed. It is always a good idea to take a look at this list to better understand the type of information covered by the index. In addition, the General Science Index includes a list of abbreviations of periodicals indexed. The periodical abbreviations are used to save space in the index. We will need to know the full title of the journal when we use the library's list of periodicals. We will also need to know the full title when we complete an interlibrary loan request. To find the full title look in the list of abbreviations.

Because the General Science Index is produced by the H.W. Wilson Company it uses the same subject headings as the Readers' Guide. In the Readers' Guide we found articles under the heading "Bioengineered foods." Let's take a look and see what we find under this heading in the General Science Index.

Notice that most of the articles in this example are different from those in the Readers' Guide. The only exceptions are the articles from BioScience and Science. BioScience and Science are indexed by both the General Science Index and the Readers' Guide. These two journals are in the gray area between scholarly journals and general interest magazines. There are many such journals and you may find it hard to determine whether the journal is scholarly or general interest. We have created a chart that will help you determine whether a periodical is a scholarly journal or a general interest magazine. Take a look at the What is a Scholarly Journal? chart.

Now let's look to see if there are articles indexed under the heading "Plant genetics."

Reading the article titles we discover that they do indeed come from scholarly journals. No general interest magazine will have an article entitle: "Cytogenetic relationships between Eragrostis curvula and E. lehmanniana complexes."

The Readers' Guide and the General Science Index have provided us with a number of good magazine and journal articles from a scientific perspective. However, what if we want information about the genetic engineering of food from a political, sociological, or psychological perspective? To find information from these perspectives we must use a different index. The H.W. Wilson Company produces a journal index entitled, Social Science Index. Press the "Continue" button below or click on the Social Science Index link in the Navigation Menu.