LibGuides: TC 302: Unarchiving the Arts / Nardini: Secondary Sources (scholarly journal articles)

Find research on your topic

During your academic career, you'll hear them called a few different things: professional sources, scholarly sources, library sources, academic sources, peer-reviewed sources, refereed sources.

Scholars share and communicate their research in journals.

The audiences of these journals is other scholars in the same, sometimes quite narrow, field.
To be published in journals, an author's work is peer-reviewed. It is judged by other experts in the field to ensure the research is ethical, of high quality, and is a meaningful contribution to the field. This process can take a long time.
Libraries subscribe to journals on your behalf. You pay a lot of money to have access to them. They are only available through proxy servers (your EID/password).

Journals are indexed on the article level in our databases. Try these:

JSTOR
Multidisciplinary. Work on your keyword strategy; otherwise, you'll be overwhelmed by results.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
MLA International Bibliography
Criticism of literature, drama and more.
Updated ten times per year. Indexes critical materials on literature, criticism, drama, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Provides access to citations from over 4,400 journals, series, books, essay collections, working papers, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Produced by the Modern Language Association.
Music Index
Criticism, reviews of books, performances and recordings.
Updated quarterly. Contains records describing articles in over 640 international periodicals in the field of music and related disciplines. Includes book reviews, recording and performance reviews, and obituaries.
International Bibliography of Art (IBA)
Research and criticism of art and artists.
Indexes scholarly literature on Western art and is the successor to the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). The database includes records created by the Getty Research Institute in 2008-09, with new records created by ProQuest using the same thesaurus and authority files.
The database will grow by 18,000 records per year, ensuring unbroken coverage of journals that were indexed in BHA and IBA prior to 2010. The initial data set created by the Getty Research Institute in 2008-2009 covers scholarship up to 2009, including retrospective records for material published in previous years, and in some cases the new ProQuest indexing will also cover retrospective years in order to fill gaps in coverage.
Publications covered include at least 500 core journals, with an emphasis on specialist and rare titles that are not covered by other indexes, plus detailed coverage of monographs, essay collections, conference proceedings and exhibition catalogues.

Bibliographies are your best friend

Folks, scroll down to the end of the article you're reading, skip to the end of the book or chapter to mine the works cited. Just as you are crafting a bibliography that someone could use to learn more about your topic, so do researchers.

Find articles from citations

Sometimes the best way to learn more is to check out the bibliography or references list in a book or article or encyclopedia. How do we follow citations?

First, you need to decide if something is a book or an article.

A citation for a book will have the author, the book title (often in italics) and the publisher:

Bursik, Robert J., Jr. and Harold G. Grasmick. 1993. Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community Control. New York: Lexington Books.

A citation for an article will usually be longer. There will be the author(s) name, the title of the article (usually in quotation marks) and then the name of the publication (journal, magazine, or newspaper) (usually in italics) the article came from:

Aseltine, Robert H., Jr. and Ronald C. Kessler. 1993. “Marital Disruption and Depression in a Community Sample.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 34(3):237-51.

You can search for the book ior article on www.lib.utexas.edu

Google Scholar
Paste citations into this search. If you use this proxy link, you will be signed into the subscriptions (and prompted for EID if you're off campus). Use the 'cited by' link under each results to see sources that have cited the source you're searching.
Google Scholar uses the popular Google search engine to enable searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar includes full text and citations.
Use this link to access Google Scholar, and see our Google Scholar Guide for information on using this resource.
If you encounter a warning about the security certificate when using the FindIt@UT tool in Google Scholar, you can learn more about that using this guide.