Finding Journal Articles
Scholarly Journal Articles
Scholarly journal articles can be located through the Performing Arts Periodicals Database, as well as through history and multi-subject databases. If you are looking for scholarly/peer-reviewed/academic articles (as opposed to performance reviews or essays), look for these features:
- at least 8-10 pages in length
- author is an academic (professor, PhD, researcher, etc....) or in some cases a practitioner (director, actor, set designer, etc...)
- published in an academic journal (Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Performance Research, Women & Performance, etc...)
- the bibliography is appropriate for the article length
You can use the same searching techniques in journal databases as you did in the library catalog.
Use the following databases to search for journal articles on your topic:
- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Performing Arts Periodicals Database indexes around 400 scholarly and trade journals, magazines, books, and newspapers covering theater, dance, film, television, stagecraft, broadcast arts, storytelling, and more. It draws from both current files and selected backfiles to 1864 and 134 publications are included in full text. Coverage: 1864-
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window Contains articles, books, chapters of books, conference proceedings, dissertations, and working papers on topics relating to literature, modern languages, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage: 1926-
- Literature Criticism Online This link opens in a new window Extensive, searchable compilation of literary commentary. Scholarly and popular commentary from broadsheets, pamphlets, books and periodicals, with page images of the print originals. Combines the contents of Contemporary Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Classical & Medieval Literature Criticism, Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, Drama Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, Shakespearean Criticism, and Children's Literature Review into a single online resource. Coverage: through June 2012
- Humanities International Index This link opens in a new window Contains scholarly journals and other periodicals and magazines covering the humanities including art, classics, history, literature, philosophy and more. Coverage: 1975-
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window A full-text database of archived issues of academic journals. Since JSTOR is a backfiles project, a typical coverage range is the beginning of a journal until three or five years ago. Supported in part by the Dail Endowment Fund. Coverage: Varies
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Provides access to the full text of scholarly journals and books in the arts and humanities and social sciences. Coverage: Varies
- America: History and Life This link opens in a new window Search for articles about the history and culure of the United States and Canada. Publications include peer-reviewed journals, magazines, dissertations, books, and more. Access is limited to six simultaneous users. Note: For world history topics, use the Historical Abstracts database. Coverage: 1964-
- Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window Provides indexing and abstracts for journal articles, books, and dissertations covering the history of the world from 1450-- except the U.S. and Canada. For similar coverage of the U.S. and Canada, use America History and Life. Access is limited to six simultaneous users. Coverage: 1954-
- Understanding Shakespeare This link opens in a new window Easily find JSTOR articles that cite a given line of a Shakespeare play. Simply navigate to the line of the play and click the number next to it to view a list of relevant articles from the JSTOR archive.
- New York Times: 1857-1922Select "advanced search" for the best search interface.
- New York Times: 1923-2017Select "advanced search" for the best search interface.
Theatre Reviews
Performance reviews can be found in many databases, theatre journals, and trade publications. Limit to "review" under document type.
Here are some places to explore:
- Performing Arts Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window Performing Arts Periodicals Database indexes around 400 scholarly and trade journals, magazines, books, and newspapers covering theater, dance, film, television, stagecraft, broadcast arts, storytelling, and more. It draws from both current files and selected backfiles to 1864 and 134 publications are included in full text. Coverage: 1864-
- New York Times: 1857-1922Select "advanced search" for the best search interface.
- New York Times: 1923-2017Select "advanced search" for the best search interface.
Locating Journals
If you already have the citation for an article you want to find, the easiest way to get to the article is to use ZSR's journals page.
Using this citation as an example, we will go through the steps to locate this article:
- Locate the name of the journal: Shakespeare in Southern Africa
- Go to the journal page and type the name of the journal into the search box (not the name of the article!):
- Select the catalog record for the journal title from the list of results
- Most of our journals are available online from multiple sources. Based on the publication date of your article, in this case 2012, select the source that has that date available:
- Depending on what information is displayed you will have to select the volume (24) or the year (2012) for your article:
- Then browse the table of contents to locate your article title and read via PDF:
