Finding Articles in General and Popular Periodicals (North America and Western Europe)

Periodicals in HathiTrust

HathiTrust Digital Library is a huge collection of digitized books and periodicals. Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata and subject terms. Most items pre-1925 will be full text viewable.  After 1925, a much smaller number will be full text viewable.  You can search within non-full text viewable works and obtain the pages numbers where your search terms occur. You can search for periodicals by title or subject, limiting to Format: Journals.

Advanced Full Text Search

In the first (Full Text) Advanced Full Text Search field, you can put terms for a full text search.  Phrases and proper names work best (exact phrase).  If you search two or more separate keywords, when you search within particular volumes, those pages containing all the keywords will sort first.

In the second search field, you can limit your full text search by:

• Title, searching the contents of a particular work, including periodical titles
• Author, searching the works of a particular author, including names of organizations and government entities.
• Subject, searching the Subject terms (same Subject terms as those used in HOLLIS) for a particular topic

Periodicals in Internet Archive

Many are available full text in the Internet Archive, including numerous trade periodicals. Search: collection:(Periodicals) AND Railroads. Select Media Type: Collections

In Advanced search:

Any field: Your topic
Collection is: Periodicals

You can search full text within a particular volume, over the whole Internet Archive, or within a particular Collection. 

• Periodicals https://archive.org/details/periodicals
• Serials in Microfilm https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm

Omit colons (:) and other punctuation in titles

These searches yield individual issues and whole runs.  Isolate whole runs by choosing Collections under Media Type.