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Special issues are any regularly published special editorial content usually having an industry or company focus. Traditionally, special issues are used to drive advertising sales in the magazine, the focus of money-making in most trade magazines.
Examples of special issues include: industry outlooks, overviews, or surveys; statistical issues; company ranking lists; buyers guides; salary surveys; product/industry focus issues; membership directories; who's who registers; tradeshow specials; etc. Many special issues are available on the Internet and are designed to be interactive/searchable and provide greater content than the printed versions. An excellent example of this is available at Fortune's website for the Fortune 500.
Whenever possible, Specialissues.com tracks the special issue, how long has the special issue has been produced and content of the issue. Additionally, the magazine's website is assessed for "invisible web" content. Examples of this include: archives, award links, buyers guides, calendars of trade fairs and events, industry website link lists, statistical information, interactive databases, glossaries, encyclopedias, dictionaries, acronym lists, etc.
Contact information for each journal includes the editor's phone/fax and the magazine's website address. Specialissues.com'search capability includes a text search engine, subject heading search and industry grouping search allowing the searcher various retrieval options.
Training for Specialissues.com is available at various levels from email and conference calls, to live site demonstrations at company facilities or major library shows.
Specialissues.com began life as a question about salary surveys to Trip Wyckoff at Houston Public Library's business reference desk. Since there were no up to date resources, Trip began tracking special issues of trade and industry magazines for fun. After taking a position as head of research at a small publishing firm, The Reference Press (now, Hoover's), he helped to publish the Directory of Business Periodcal Special Issues and started a newsletter, SI: Special Issues, that has formed the basis for Specialissues.com.
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"Thanks for keeping the price the same! It's so nice to be able to tell our users, "Yes, that's covered in the June issue of BlahBlahBlah. I'll get you a copy." Makes the Information Resource Center look good!"
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senior information specialist at an industrial gases company
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