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Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature Lesson The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature is probably the most used magazine index ever produced. The Readers' Guide can be found in nearly every high school, public and college library in the country. The Readers' Guide is quite easy to use once you know how it works. Let's take a closer look at how the Readers' Guide is put together and how to use it effectively.
It is well worth reading an index's introductory pages. Here we learn that the Readers' Guide is arranged in one alphabet that includes both author and subject headings. "One alphabet" means that author headings and subject headings are integrated into one alphabet in the index, i.e.., A-Z. This is important to know because some indexes split author and subject headings into two separate alphabets. The above usage guide also informs us that Readers' Guide includes book, ballet, compact disc, dance, movie, musical, opera, phonograph, product, radio show, tape recording, television, theater and video reviews. This is important to know if we are looking for reviews. Many people are interested in finding reviews of movies, television shows, music albums, or the theater, but not every magazine index includes these reviews in the information they index. The usage guide also shows us that the Readers' Guide indexes poems; short stories; and works of fiction. Knowing what an index includes allows us to use it more efficiently. If we do not know what type of information an index includes we may waste our time looking for things that are not there. Once we know how an index is arranged and what it includes we may need help on interpreting the information. Most print periodical indexes provide us with such help. The Readers' Guide provides us with a sample entry and how to interpret it.
So if we have questions about how to use a print index we simply look at the preface and introductory matter. We will now walk through a sample search. Let's pretend again that we are searching for information on the genetic engineering of food and we have chosen to look for magazine articles in Readers' Guide. There are other periodical indexes that we will want to consult on this topic, but for now we will look at the Readers' Guide because it indexes more general use magazines published with the lay reader in mind. Unlike the WebPALS General Magazine Database, we cannot combine all our search terms in one search. In a print index we must look at one subject heading at a time. Searching the WebPALS General Magazine Database we learned that the subject heading "bioengineering" seemed to turn up useful information. When we look up "bioengineering" in the 1996 edition of Readers' Guide we find a "See also" reference but we don't see any articles. If we look above the "Bioengineering" entry we see an entry for "Bioengineered Foods." This subject heading describes our topic exactly and there are five articles listed. A number of these articles look good. To determine if the library owns the magazines listed we must consult the library's periodicals holdings list. At the MCTC library this list is located on the periodical index tables next to all the magazine and journal indexes. If the library does not own the magazine or journal we can still get a copy of the article by simply filling out an interlibrary loan form. At the MCTC library the interlibrary loan forms are located at the Circulation Desk.
Look again at the "Bioengineering" subject entry. "See also" is known as a cross reference and tells us that there are other related subject headings in the index. We might want to look up these cross references and see if there are any articles that might be of interest to you. Rather than looking at these cross references now, we will take a different approach. We are going to look and see if there are any entries under "Agriculture". Food production is part of agriculture and this broader subject heading might provide us with other useful subject headings. When we turn to the section of the index that lists "Agriculture" we find lots of information. There is a very helpful subject entry entitled "Agricultural Research."
It looks like there are three very good articles in the magazine BioScience. If we were to check the MCTC library periodical list we find that the MCTC library subscribes to the magazine BioScience and that it keeps the current 15 years of the magazine on the shelves. In addition to these three articles we see a number of helpful cross references to other subject entries. We are going to look and see if there are any good articles listed under "Plant genetics."
Here we find a number of other useful articles. Most of the magazines listed are owned by the MCTC library. The magazines BioScience and Science sound like they might be scholarly journals, which is confusing because we said that the Readers' Guide indexes general interest magazines. BioScience and Science are in a class of periodicals that are difficult to label. They do contain scholarly articles, but they are not at quite the same level as other scholarly science journals. However, both BioScience and Science are indexed in the H.W. Wilson Company's General Science Index which indexes scholarly journals. This is a case where there is no clear cut answer and we will have to use our own judgment. Let's turn to the General Science Index and see how it compares with the Readers' Guide. Click on the "Continue" button below or on the General Science link in the Navigation Menu.
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Reader' Guide
