Consumer Reports on line through ICPL.

Begun in 1936, Consumer Reports magazine is the go-to source for unbiased consumer reviews of consumer products - from air conditioners to vacuums and everything in between. Consumer Reports publishes reviews and comparisons of products based on its own  in-house laboratory testing and survey research center.  Published monthly by the not for profit organization Consumer's Union,  Consumer Reports contains no advertising, and they anonymously purchase every product that they test at retail price, and they accept no free samples for testing.   Consumer Reports forbids the use of its reviews by manufacturers – positive reviews may not be used to help sell merchandise, and CR has gone to court to enforce that rule.

The print version of Consumer Reports is available at ICPL both as a circulating magazine and as a Reference item to be used here in the Library.

If you have an ICPL Library card and live in Iowa City, Hills, Lone Tree, University Heights or rural Johnson County you can access Consumer Reports articles online through ICPL’s online database “EbscoHost Magazine Index" by following these steps:

To get to the online databases, from the library's homepage (icpl.org) find the link to Reference and Research on the left hand side, and click to see the dropdown menu.   From there choose Online Resources.

From the Online Resources page, choose Magazines & Newspapers.

On the Magazines & Newspapers page, you need to scroll down to find EbscoHost Magazine Index - and click on the link that says visit now.

EbscoHost itself is a very large product that provides access to a wide variety of databases.   Consumer Reports is contained in the default search MasterFILE Premier, so simply click on the continue button at this step.

On the homepage of EbscoHost there is a search box, and you could search for your article here, but you will likely get a wide variety of results from a wide variety of magazines.   To go directly to Consumer Reports, it is faster to do an Advanced Search.

From the advance search page, fill in the subject you're looking for at the top of the form then scroll down until you find the blank for Publication and put Consumer Reports in that blank. Then hit the green Search button.

The search results page will show you a list of articles to choose from.   You can either click on the individual article to read more about it, or click directly on one of the full text options - either PDF or HTML to view as a web page.