Periodicals include newspapers, magazines, and academic and professional journals. A periodicals room — or journals room — contains recent issues that library visitors may browse. Many libraries also have a separate room for newspapers published in the last few weeks or months. To ensure everyone’s access to recently published issues, most libraries don’t allow you to check out periodicals published within the last year, and they usually don’t allow newspapers to be checked out at all.

Older periodicals are sometimes placed in bound volumes in the stacks. Few libraries, however, keep back issues of newspapers in paper form. Instead, you can often find back issues of leading newspapers in full-text databases or in microform. Microform is a generic name for both microfilm, a strip of film containing greatly reduced images of printed pages, and microfiche, film roughly the size of an index card containing the same kinds of miniaturized images. You view these images using a microform reader, a projection unit that looks something like a large computer monitor. Many microform readers allow you to print copies of the pages.

Electronic databases of periodicals can help you locate specific articles on your subject, since these databases are more likely than print indexes and bibliographies to contain listings of recent publications. Once you’ve identified an article you want to review, you’ll need to find the periodical in which it appears. Conduct a title search for the periodical in the same way you conduct a title search for a book. The library catalog will tell you the call number of the periodical and usually will give information about its location in the library. In addition, some libraries provide a printed list that identifies where periodicals are located. If you have difficulty finding a periodical or judging which publications are likely to be useful for your writing project, ask a librarian for assistance.