Guides: Theatre Arts: Databases & Journals

START WITH THESE

Academic Search Ultimate
Academic Search Ultimate is our largest multidisciplinary database of academic journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos.
MLA International Bibliography with Full Text
Combines the definitive index for the study of language, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and film with full text for more than 1,000 journals, including many of the leading publications in these fields. Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and international in scope, the bibliography covers scholarly publications from the early 20th century to the present, including journal articles, books, series, translations, websites, and dissertations. The database also includes MLA Directory of Periodicals and the MLA Thesaurus.
OneFile: Fine Arts
Search a subset of Gale Academic OneFile journals covering the fine arts such as drama, music, art history and filmmaking. Exclusive features, including Topic Finder, InterLink, and a mobile-optimized interface, support and enhance the search experience.
Formerly called Fine Arts and Music Collection

Oxford Reference Online: Performing Arts

OTHER DATABASES

Academic OneFile
Provides millions of articles from over 17,000 scholarly journals and other authoritative sources—including thousands of podcasts and transcripts from NPR and CNN as well as videos from BBC Worldwide Learning.
Credo Reference
Find quick facts and background information in over 600 reference sources. Then continue searching in the NOBLE catalog and other electronic resources right from the Credo search screen.
JSTOR
A collection of core scholarly journals, many going back to the first volume. Emphasis is on back issue coverage. JSTOR also has an extensive collection of primary sources.
Sage Journals Online
A searchable collection of scholarly online journals published by Sage, covering humanities, natural science, education, fine arts, music, and social science

Identify Keywords

The building block of a library database search is keywords. Keywords are central ideas or terms within your research question or problem.

Boolean Search Operators

Once you have your keywords identified (2-3 is a good place to begin), you then need to connect them together in a way the database understands how to search. This is done using the Boolean search operators AND, OR, and NOT. Connecting keywords using these search operators creates a search string.

AND - narrow search, used to combine terms together and focus search results (college and artificial intelligence)
OR - broad search, used to includes results that contain similar or like words, such as synonyms (ChatGPT or artificial intelligence)
NOT - narrow search by exclusion, used to exclude results containing a particular keyword (gaming not gambling)

Enter Keywords in Database Search

Enter your keywords, connected with the appropriate Boolean operator.
Use the filters to narrow your results. Peer reviewed and full text are automatically selected, but you may want to narrow the results to those published in the last 10 years.

Using Search Results

Sort your search results by Date Newest so the most current information on a subject is at the top of your results.
Use the "Cited by" or "Cited References" features contained in many library databases to view a list of resources that have cited the particular article currently being viewed in their own work or are contained within the Reference list of the current article being viewed.

Do not limit your search to just one database. Instead look at a variety of databases both subject specific and interdisciplinary to make sure you are viewing the full scope of literature published on your topic.