Research Guides: #Art, Art History, & Art Appreciation: Scholarly Research

Before You Research

Scholarly articles are not the place to start your research. First, you need to get familiar enough with your topic that you can start to narrow it down, and for that you need more general information. This will help you develop context for your topic as well as get to know the specialized terms used by experts.

Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
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Full-text art reference (including Grove Art, but not Benezit Dictionary of Artists) covering all visual arts from prehistory to present. Many images included along with articles providing overviews of artists, movements, periods, and places.
Contains links to 5,000 images the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Art Images for College Teaching (AICT), and the Artists Rights Society and text from Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
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Useful when you're starting out on a research project. Do simple searches to find topic introductions in a variety of subjects. The mind map tool will help you discover related ideas and terms.

Journals & Periodicals: Identifying Scholarly Sources
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This guide introduces scholarly content and how it differs from popular and trade information.

LSC Databases for Scholarly Articles

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Complete historical full text of all issues of peer-reviewed journals in a wide range of humanities and social science fields. (pronounced jay-store)
Fine Arts (Gale OneFile) This link opens in a new window
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Search millions of articles about drama, music, art history, and filmmaking. Diverse resource for serious fine arts students.
Search all Gale databases at once with Gale PowerSearch.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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Full text of 285 journals in literature, history, international/cultural studies, and other fields within the humanities and social sciences.
Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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Multi-disciplinary database; full text of articles from over 5,300 journals, magazines and newspapers, plus image collections.
Communication & Mass Media Complete (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
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Full text from over 500 journals for communication, mass media, and other closely-related fields.

Tutorial: Evaluating Information Sources for Art