Periodicals Index Online

Three centuries of the arts, humanities, and social sciences indexed coverage, from first issue to 1995 or ceased date, are offered in this newly released database, with access to a growing collection of over 18 million citations.   

Periodicals Index Online (PIO) (formerly, Periodicals Contents Index (PCI)), is the leading multidisciplinary index to the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Over 6,000 journals are included, with around one million records from new journals added yearly. Complete runs of these titles are indexed, from first issue to 1995 or ceased date.

The scope is international, including journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and most other Western languages. Over 30% of the content indexed is from non-English scholarly titles.

For more than 200 years, periodicals have been a vital resource for scholars. However, if researchers need to find articles in periodical back volumes, they have to search through dozens, if not hundreds, of printed subject indexes and bibliographies. Even if their library holds these indexes, searches can be time consuming and incomplete.

PIO now makes it possible to search back volumes of journals with the same ease and convenience as searching the latest issues. It fills an enormous gap in access to scholarly, periodical literature for the humanities and social sciences.

PIO enables users to search for articles by words or phrases in the titles, by author, and by journal title. The search can be restricted by the language of the article, the journal's subject, the year of publication, or a range of dates. Boolean operators can be used for more complex searches, and truncation can also be used to find variant forms of a word. Sophisticated post-search sorting and filtering are new features which support fast, convenient, and reliable results.

Bibliographic information can be searched separately for every journal indexed in PIO. In addition, researchers can access a list of issues for each journal and a table of contents for each issue.

Periodicals Index Online is fully OpenURL and Z39.50 enabled, allowing the index to function as a high-quality finding aid to all available full-text sources. There is direct linking to Periodicals Archive Online for mutual customers, as well as JSTOR linking.  

Durable URLs across all content, an Information Resources area, citation software support, and COUNTER-compliant usage statistics are some of the tools available for this optimized resource.