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.
MLA International Bibliography
Criticism of literature, drama and more.
Music Index
Criticism, reviews of books, performances and recordings.
International Bibliography of Art (IBA)
Research and criticism of art and artists.

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.