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Special Periodical Issues about African Women, 1972–1991

Special issues of periodicals can provide a wealth of information on a given topic in one location-sometimes as much information as in an edited monograph. Additionally, periodical literature is heavily utilized by academic library users. One study indicates that over 60 percent of graduate students use periodical literature at least once a week (Bachmann-Derthick and Spurlock, 1989:173-174). Libraries are heavily invested in periodicals with over half of the acquisitions budgets of many libraries devoted to serials. Unfortunately, bibliographic access to special periodical issues is often limited. Detailed information about special issues is usually not available to users via the online or card catalog unless an issue was analyzed in cataloging. One may gain access to individual articles through periodical indexes, but many printed indexes do not index all the articles in a special issue nor indicate that a particular article is part of a special issue. This is due in part to space limitations and the increased cost of including additional pages in the indexes. An example is Women Studies Abstracts, which listed the contents of special issues until the mid-1980s. This bibliography is designed to serve as a starting point in the research process by drawing together material covering a number of years on this specific topic. This tool may be particularly helpful to undergraduate students who have little or no prior knowledge of the topic; it may also be useful to graduate students, faculty, and librarians. The period covered is 1972 (the earliest special issue periodical I could locate on this topic) to December 1991. The material covered is primarily in English,