Short Story Index

Illustration from:
Art Museum Image Gallery

A convenient digital guide to thousands of short stories!

Locate more than 96,000 stories, including the full text of over 4,000 stories—with the pinpoint accuracy of electronic searching! For the reader seeking short fiction by a favorite author, the teacher looking for the quintessential example of a particular genre, or the student researching the body of work of a literary figure, Short Story Index is a practical resource.

Indexes short stories published in more than 4,200 collections and anthologies, plus stories that appear in periodicals!
Bonus for WilsonWeb subscribers: full text of more than 4,000 short stories and growing with daily updates!
Searching by author, title, subject, keyword, date, literary technique, source, or any combination—makes finding the story you want a sure thing.
Retrospective coverage back to 1984.
Subject access includes theme, locale, narrative technique or device (such as surprise endings, dialect stories, parodies, story-within-a-story) and genre.
Includes stories from over 150 of the periodicals indexed by Readers’ Guide and Humanities Index.
Database grows by 4,000 records each year.
Entries feature links to other works by the author and other stories in the source collection.
Library holdings indicator, linked to your OPAC, lets users know if they'll find cited publications on your shelves.
Up-to-date subject headings keep pace with contemporary topics of interest.
Wilson quality indexing—done by professionals—guarantees user satisfaction with search results.
Updated daily on WilsonWeb. Also available in print.

Detailed Bibliographic Information to Help You Locate Short Stories,
Plus WilsonWeb Tools to Get them Faster

Library holdings indicator, linked to your OPAC, lets users know if they'll find cited publications on your shelves.

WilsonLink Open-URL technology links to full text articles on any of your library’s reference databases that are OpenURL compliant.

What journals are included in Short Story Index?

Short Story Index is essentially a book index. Anthologies and collections of short stories (books) are analyzed as they are published, and those records are added to the database throughout the year. At the end of every year, in preparation for the annual print volume, all the short stories from periodicals that have been indexed that year in Wilson’s Humanities Index and Readers’ Guide are brought in to the database as well. This is on the item level rather than the journal level. There are no specific journals analyzed for short stories.

To find all the journals from which at least one short story has been included in Short Story Index, go to the Browse display in Short Story Index and search for “A” in “Journal Name”. There you will see a list of journals, each followed by the number of postings. Some journals have published only a few short stories over the years. Others have published many.