Using The Readers Guide To Periodical Literature

Library research, especially in fields like science that are rapidly evolving, used to require trips to the library to locate relevant articles in journals and magazines. The Reader's Guide was a fixture in libraries. It was an index of articles in current periodicals and was published in bound form several times per year, with monthly softcover updates. To find information on your topic, you would have to look it up in each year/month's edition of the Reader's Guide and copy down the title, date, etc. of any relevant magazines. You would then present this information to a clerk who would retrieve the materials from a storeroom. Oftentimes, researching a single topic would require looking up the same term in eight or nine different editions of the Guide, since each volume only contained about one year's-worth of articles.

This system has been rendered obsolete with the advent of searchable online periodical databases. These first appeared as CD-ROMs? which could be accessed on library computers and then evolved into web-based online services like ProQuest?, LexisNexis?, and others. The user can perform a full-text search of millions of articles in hundreds of periodicals in seconds, and many of the articles are available for printing directly from the host site.