Articles in periodicals can be good sources of current information which may not yet be available in books or reference sources. Periodicals include newspapers and popular magazines, scholarly journals, and trade publications. Click here for further explanation of different types of periodicals.

Indexes and abstracts are used to find periodical articles on your topic. They do not contain the articles themselves but give you all the information you need to find the articles. They provide citations (author, title, magazine or journal title, volume, date and pages. Abstracts also provide summaries of the articles. Note that many CUNY databases are “Full Text,” meaning they provide the articles along with the citations and abstract. You may not need to use Indexes and Abstracts if your topic is covered in a Full Text database.