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Now the first thing, of course, we must know is what are periodicals.
After all if you need articles from periodicals you have to know what they are.
There are three major types. News papers of course, magazines,
and of course the gold standard of academia the journal: peer reviewed and scholarly.
But the trick is this, all journals are periodicals but not all periodicals are journals.
If you’re in the library there is not trick at all. If your periodical has a picture of
pop stars,
or better yet pretty ladies, or pretty ladies who are pop stars best of all,
you know you have a mass media popular magazine.
You take a look at this the deadly yellow mustard cover is a dead give away
right there you know this is a journal, the roman serf font print, there are no glossy
pages or advertising.
Some people can get confused, they think that they can always tell
whether or not it is a journal by the title. Don’t fall for that.
American Sociological Review peer reviewed, academic scholarly journal,
The National Review right wing propaganda sheet. See? It’s not always easy to tell.
Some people think that some subjects are scholarly and some are not going to be scholarly.
Here we go. Sports illustrated popular, mass media magazine.
The journal of sport behavior peer reviewed academic journal.
Now here on the cover we’ve got Oscar de la Hoya.
Some feel this man to be the finest boxer who ever lived.
So, this guy he’s going to fly out, he goes to LA, he is going to go interview Oscar,
he gets an interpreter he asks his five big questions of Oscar. Then he types them up
and he sends them back to Shytown because this is published in Chicago.
Three days start to finish; a copy editor looks at it, does a couple things then it
is published. They are done.
Now this on the other hand, a journal as an article on how boxing injuries changed over
the last century.
Boxing is like any other sport it’s not static it changes through time.
Plus we have medical technology we can actually diagnose and treat things that 50 years ago
they didn’t even know you had.
So he’s going to measure that. He’s going to use an old-fashioned measurement tool he’s
going to use a survey.
Who’s he going to send it to? What about boxers?
What about boxers? I mean who’s going to know better if their ear rings in the morning
when they get up
because they got caught by a right hook one time to often.
See so he sends out a big huge survey gets his results back, does a little statistical
work
and then he submits it to the peers. All the articles are reviewed by the peers.
And the peers take a look at his article on boxing injuries and they say well you know
that section
on your lower lumbar stretch injuries is a little week you have got to buff that up.
So he buffs it up. He then resubmits it, they approve it. It gets published.
One year start to finish. The differences in the periodicals can be used to your advantage,
the trick is always to look at the end of the article first.
Don’t read the article first, look at the end, look for references, notes, bibliographies.
It doesn’t matter what type of source you have got it can be online, it can be a book,
it can be a monograph.
Maybe you are doing research on the undead, right. Is this scholarly? Doesn’t look scholarly.
But you know what?
It has an action packed bibliography. It is completely a scholarly work by an academic.
That’s right and that is what I always do first if I’m not sure. I always check for
the bibliography.
Then if the article looks good, the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go back
to the front and I’m going to look for the abstract.
That’s what I’m going to read next, always read the abstract. It is a short one-paragraph
summary.
It tells you what the author did how she went about doing it and what she found out.
If that doesn’t look good you can quit I promise you it won’t get any better.
