Finding magazines
New and improved search engines can take you right to them

Magazines took a bit longer than newspapers to establish themselves on the web. Search tools to find magazines have always been more limited as well.

The good news is that the web now offers a variety of sources to find magazines and specific articles, though they are still not up to the level of newspaper resources.

General tools

The best tool by far is Magazine Boy (www.themagazineboy.com), a sister site to the equally excellent Paperboy. Magazine Boy allows you to search by country or by subject - or both. For example, you can look for newsmagazines in Australia or health magazines in the UK.

Magazine Boy also allows you to search by language. A neat tool also allows you to instantly translate an entire magazine web site into the language of your choice before you go to the site.

Ecola in general offers an excellent world overview (www.ecola.com/news/magazine). You can browse by country at www.ecola.com/news/magazine/world/. Or you can search by magazine title at www.ecola.com/news/search.

Yahoo offers a decent general list at dir.yahoo.com/news_and_media/magazines/index.html and a very convenient breakdown by world regions at dir.yahoo.com/News_and_Media/Magazines/By_Region/Regions/

If you want a more academic bent, try the special list of scholarly journals on the web at info.lib.uh.edu/wj/webjour.html (that's right, there is no "www")

Canadian magazines

For Canadian magazines, one of the best tools is the alphabetical listing by the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association. The association also has a good subject site at www.cmpa.ca/magindexsubj.html.

Ecola's listing, acceptable for worldwide magazines, is not as good for Canada but has a few listings (at www.ecola.com/news/magazine/na/ca/)

JournalismNet's Canadian magazine site also lists some of the top magazines. (www.journalismnet.com/mags/canada.htm)

Finding articles

You can use the excellent news search tools now available on the web to find magazine articles, but most of these sites favour newspapers over magazines. (You can find these news search tools on JNet's News Search page at www.journalismnet.com/news)

Magportal is a relatively new site that allows you to search through a variety of high-quality magazines for free.

Another free service is FindArticles. The service's resource list is not as vast but it has a decent search engine.

Elibrary is probably the best and more extensive magazine article search tool for a reasonable price (about $10 a month.) There is a U.S. service (www.elibrary.com) and a Canadian service (www.elibrary.ca). Joining the Canadian service gives you access to US magazines as well.

As always, this article and all my previous columns are available online with hot links on the JournalismNet page called JNet Tips (www.journalismnet.com/tips)

Julian Sher is the creator and webmaster of Journalism Net (www.journalismnet.com) and an Internet trainer and freelance TV producer. He can be reached by email at jsher@journalism.com.