Find Sources - UGS 302: British Pop Music 1956-2006 - Nehring - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

1. Choose a Database

Single articles on a topic are found in our library databases. The UT Libraries pay to have access to these databases and the articles they contain.

You can search in databases that are multidisciplinary, subject specific, or that contain a particular type of information.

Multidisciplinary databases contain articles on many topics/from many areas of study. A good place to start for a multidisciplinary search is the main search bar on the library homepage which searches lots of databases or Academic Search Complete.
Subject Specific databases contain articles from specific disciplines like Medicine, English, or Psychology. See your list of suggested databases below.
Databases contain many types of information from scholarly sources to newspapers to encyclopedia articles.

2. Keywords

Keyword tool
Use this tool to help you brainstorm keywords on your topic.

Searching databases is different than searching Google. Distil what you're looking for into a few key terms or phrases. Think of different ways to say those key terms, because different writers will refer to the same concept using different terms.

Write down your topic and underline the main concepts (ex. British pop music and social protest)

For each main concept, brainstorm a few synonyms and related terms (broader or narrower) that get at that concept:

Key Concepts

Pop Music

Great Britain

Social Protest

Time period

Related Terms

Particular band

Musical era/style (ex. punk)

United Kingdom

Protest

anti-Capitalism

Nuclear disarmament

1970s

Maybe political era in Britain, ex. Thatcher Government

Combine key terms using AND and OR:
- AND narrows your search by looking for articles with all of the words (your two or three key concepts should be connected with AND, because you need all of them represented in useful articles).
- OR broadens your search by looking for articles with any of the words (synonyms and related terms should be separated by OR - they get at the same key concepts, so any of them are useful).
Try different combinations of your keywords to get better results as you search.

3. Suggested Databases

Library search bar - advanced search
A great place to start for this class! The advanced search version of the search bar on the library homepage. Use options to limit to books or to scholarly/peer reviewed articles.

Find scholarly articles in databases

Academic Search Complete
Unlimited users.
Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
JSTOR
Unlimited users.
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
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
5 users.
Updated monthly. Produced by the RILM International Center at the City University of New York Graduate Center, this database is an international bibliography on music and related disciplines with citations to books, articles, videos, bibliographies, ethnographic recordings, dissertations, e-publications, films, catalogues, iconographies, critical commentaries to complete works, Festschriften, conference proceedings, reviews, recording notes, and pedagogical manuals if they are of scholarly interest. Indexes and abstracts over 500 scholarly journals and contains records in over 100 languages (titles and abstracts are in English).
Historical Abstracts
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains citations and abstracts of worldwide literature (excluding the United States and Canada) from approximately 2,100 journals and (since 1980) books and dissertations on political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural and intellectual history and related areas of the social sciences and humanities. Covers history dating from 1450 to the present. The database corresponds to the print Historical Abstracts, which was produced by ABC-CLIO.
America: History and Life
Unlimited users.
Covers United States and Canadian history and culture from prehistory to present, and includes indexing of over 1800 scholarly journals and magazines.
SocINDEX with Full Text
Unlimited users.
In addition to full-text journals, SocINDEX with Full Text contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895. Includes indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical content sources.

Find news in a library database

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive
Unlimited users.
An archival research resource containing the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000. The core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theater are all included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews.
Nexis Uni
Unlimited users.
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.

Find encyclopedia articles in a database

Gale eBooks
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. A database of encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources. Fully searchable across all files.

For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide

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What are databases?

This video, from RMIT University, explains what a database is...

Where's the Article?

If you don’t see a .pdf of the article you want, click FIND IT AT UT to find it in another database or in print in the Libraries.

If it is only in print in the Libraries or we don’t own the article, click GET A SCAN to have the article emailed to you. This option will take a few days.